Decolonising food regulatory frameworks: importance of recognising traditional culture when assessing dietary safety of traditional foods.

As interest in Australian native products continues to grow worldwide, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (First Peoples) are striving to be industry leaders in the production of their traditional foods that are being developed for commercial markets. To successfully gain market approval both within Australia and globally, food regulatory authorities require at least a documented history of safe use to indicate dietary safety. Moreover, many countries also require compositional analysis and safety data to further support their safe human consumption. However, safety data are lacking for many of these traditional food items and the history that surrounds their safe use has rarely been recorded in written form, but rather passed on through cultural practices and language. This review evaluates the suitability of current frameworks for assessing the dietary safety of traditional foods and highlights the food-safety regulatory hurdles currently felt by First Peoples and their businesses attempting to enter the Australian native foods industry. These issues also extend to the requirements of food regulatory authorities around the world, when assessing the market eligibility of traditional food items. Potential solutions to these problems are discussed, including new proposed processes that can be incorporated into the current food regulatory frameworks. Importantly, these proposed processes would allow the dietary risk assessment of traditional foods to be completed in a manner that better accommodates the stories, traditional knowledge and interests of First Peoples, while also meeting the safety data requirements set out by regulatory bodies both within Australia and around the world.

Optimization of Benzothiazole and Thiazole Hydrazones as Inhibitors of Schistosome BCL-2.

Limited therapeutic options are available for the treatment of human schistosomiasis caused by the parasitic Schistosoma flatworm. The B cell lymphoma-2 (BCL-2)-regulated apoptotic cell death pathway in schistosomes was recently characterized and shown to share similarities with the intrinsic apoptosis pathway in humans. Here, we exploit structural differences in the human and schistosome BCL-2 (sBCL-2) pro-survival proteins toward a novel treatment strategy for schistosomiasis. The benzothiazole hydrazone scaffold previously employed to target human BCL-XL was repurposed as a starting point to target sBCL-2. We utilized X-ray structural data to inform optimization and then applied a scaffold-hop strategy to identify the 5-carboxamide thiazole hydrazone scaffold (43) with potent sBCL-2 activity (IC50 30 nM). Human BCL-XL potency (IC50 13 nM) was inadvertently preserved during the optimization process. The lead analogues from this study exhibit on-target activity in model fibroblast cell lines dependent on either sBCL-2 or human BCL-XL for survival. Further optimization of the thiazole hydrazone class is required to exhibit activity in schistosomes and enhance the potential of this strategy for treating schistosomiasis.