Anti-Infective Agents in Medicinal Chemistry (Formerly Current Medicinal Chemistry - Anti-Infective Agents) - Volume 5, Issue 3, 2006

As the problem of antibiotic resistance to the major families of compounds continues, so grows the efforts and complexity of chemically modifying natural product antibiotics to combat and thwart infectious disease pathogens, the topic of this issue of Current Medicinal Chemistry, Anti-Infective Agents. As chemical modification space disappears around simpler, more synthetically amenable families, such as the β-lactams and th Read More

Nonribosomally synthesized peptides constitute a large class of highly diverse natural products, which play an important role in modern medicine. The biological activity of these complex compounds ranges from antibiotics to immunosuppressives, cytostatics to cytotoxics, a fact that makes them attractive scaffolds for drug leads. In more recent years, chemoenzymatic strategies were developed allowing the synthesis and d Read More

In the light of emerging bacterial-resistance, novel antimicrobial agents are needed to combat infectious diseases. A group of post-translationally modified peptides called lantibiotics frequently appear from screening of active natural compounds. Many lantibiotics target Lipid II, the essential precursor of bacterial cell wall synthesis. A recently characterised Lipid II-binding motif, the pyrophosphate cage, demonstrates a uniqu Read More

Aminoglycosides represent an important resource against infectious diseases. However, the prevalence of aminoglycoside resistant bacteria has limited their clinical efficacy and prompted the renewed interest in the study of resistant mechanisms as well as the development of novel aminoglycoside antibiotics. This review will focus on the latest development in the design and synthesis of novel aminoglycoside derivatives.

Nucleoside reverse-transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs), including stavudine (d4T), zidovudine (AZT), didanosine (ddI), zalcitabine (ddC), lamivudine (3TC) and abacavir (ABC), inhibit/terminate the reverse transcription of the HIV virus, and markedly improve life expectancy and quality of life in HIV-infected patients. This progress, however, has come at the price of frequent side effects. NRTIs can cause myopathy, cardiomyopathy, p Read More

Insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus is among the most common metabolic disorders in humans. It results from the graduate loss of function and progressive destruction of insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreatic islets of Langerhans. Several factors have been implicated in the pathogenesis of the disease, including host genetics, autoimmune responses and environmental factors. Viruses are among the environ Read More

Bacterial urinary tract infections (UTIs) are frequently found in the outpatient as well as in the nosocomial setting. The bacterial UTIs can be stratified into uncomplicated and complicated UTIs. In uncomplicated UTIs Escherichia coli is the leading organism, whereas in complicated UTIs the bacterial spectrum is much broader including Gramnegative and Gram-positive organisms. Therapy of uncomplicated UTIs is almost Read More