Oral Miltefosine Plus Topical Paromomycin In American Cutaneous Leishmaniasis

Cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) is endemic in the New World from approximately the US-Mexican border through Central America and the Northern part of South America down to the level of Rio de Janeiro.

L braziliensis CL is perhaps the most important of these diseases, since its natural cure rate is low and it may metastasize, and our group has been evaluating therapies for L braziliensis in Bolivia for some time.

In recent studies at investigator's Bolivian site for the years 2013-2016, the cure rate for L braziliensis CL has been 70%-80% for standard systemic and local therapies. Systemic agents intramuscular pentavalent antimony cured 80% (114 of 143) and oral miltefosine cured 81% (47 of 58). Local injections with pentamidine cured 72% (43 of 60); intralesional antimony cured 70% (21 of 30). In contrast, cryotherapy was ineffective [20% (4 of 20) cured and placebo creams cured 17% (5 of 30) in one report and 10% more recently.

Investigator's have recently evaluated treatment with topical paromomycin cream. Paromomycin-in-Aquaphilic had a cure rate of 77.5% (31 of 40 patients) compared to a cure rate of only 10% (2 of 20 patients) for the Aquaphilic vehicle alone. This remarkably high cure rate, combined with essentially no adverse events (both Paromomycin-Aquaphilic and Aquaphilic vehicle had only grade 1 adverse reactions in 5-10% of patients), makes Paromomycin-Aquaphilic very attractive for Bolivian CL.

It would benefit patients if cure rates could be consistently >90%. Since all the individual therapies, whether systemic, local injections, or local cream, have an approximately 75% cure rate, we propose testing a combination of two treatment. The most attractive systemic therapy is the only oral agent, miltefosine, and the most attractive local therapy is simple application of Paromomycin cream. Thus the present protocol proposes to evaluate the efficacy of miltefosine, 2.5 mg/kg (50 mg tid) for 28 days, plus Paromomycin-Aquaphilic daily for 28 days. The controls will be the two components of this combination used separately: miltefosine alone, Paromomycin-Aquaphilic alone.