Abstract Currently available first-line antiparasitic treatments against Chagas disease can produce adverse side effects and are not fully effective in the chronic stage of the disease. As a result, there is a sustained research effort to discover new chemical entities and therapeutic formulations to feed clinical development pipelines for Chagas disease. Eventually these drugs will enter a clinical study to evaluate their efficacy. However, there are known difficulties in assessing therapeutic efficacy in patients in the chronic stage: subclinical parasitemia makes circulating parasites difficult to detect either by direct observation or by molecular methods (PCR).