Mushroom and mushroom-derived compounds in the management of Leishmaniasis

Leishmaniasis is a zoonotically affected disease caused by the vector-borne parasite Leishmania and transmitted by an infected female Phlebotomine sandfly. It infects 2 million people every year causing more than 50000 deaths among the affected in nearly 100 endemic countries. Hepatosplenomegaly, musculoskeletal pain, kidney failure, chronic fever and a weakened immune system that is susceptible to some different diseases are the most prominent symptoms of the disease. Medical treatments are based on age-old antimonial and new therapies used in the treatment are the combination of drugs of liposomal amphotericin B, paromomycin and miltefosine. One of the principal challenges in these curatives is resistance, a long-term convoluted routine with a lot of disastrous side effects and high prices. Naturally derived compounds can be one of the options in medical therapy and many anti-leishmanial compounds have been found from natural background till now with leishmanicidal properties. Mushrooms, one of the key members of nature, enriched with a plethora of bioactive molecules, play a vital role in the prevention of human diseases. To understand the progress in natural medicine, scientific reports published in ISI PubMed, Google Scholar, Scopus and Science Direct from 2006 to 2023 on mushrooms and mushroom-derived compounds having anti-leishmanial properties were summarized. In this study, we have tried to report the novel mushrooms and their potential to combat Leishmaniasis, revealing their mode of action which will be helpful in the future for the identification of bioactive molecules resourcing from mushrooms.