Current Pharmaceutical Design - Volume 17, Issue 13, 2011

There is a clear and emergent need for a new approach in antimicrobial drug discovery. Pathogenic microorganisms have demonstrated an impressive ability to adapt and develop resistance to antimicrobial agents. The quick emergence of resistance to essentially all broad-spectrum antimicrobial agents has been well established. For example, resistance to penicillin was observed 3 years after its deployment, while th Read More

The substantial morbidity and mortality associated with invasive fungal infections constitute undisputed tokens of their severity. The continued expansion of susceptible population groups (such as immunocompromised individuals, patients undergoing extensive surgery, and those hospitalized with serious underlying diseases especially in the intensive care unit) and the limitations of current antifungal agents due to Read More

Horseshoe crabs are an ancient invertebrate which possesses powerful innate immune defense against microbes. The simplicity, specificity and rapidity of its antimicrobial response have accorded the horseshoe crab as an excellent animal model from which immune responsive tissues may be procured for biomedical research. Such usefulness is exemplified by the extensive application for nearly four decades, of the limulus Read More

The larvae of the greater wax moth Galleria mellonella prosper in use both as surrogate alternative model hosts for human pathogens and as a whole-animal-high-throughput-system for in vivo testing of antibiotics or mutant-libraries of pathogens. In addition, a broad spectrum of antimicrobial peptides and proteins has been identified in this insect during the past decade among which some appear to be specific fo Read More

The past few decades have seen alarming rates of antimicrobial drug resistance. This trend paralleled a lack of conventional methods of discovery of antibiotics with novel mechanisms of action. Although use of mammalian models remains indispensable for preclinical testing of new antimicrobial compounds, combating emerging multidrug-resistant microbial pathogens may require the use of robust, high-throughput Read More

The intestinal tract of a host exposed to extreme physiologic stress and modern medical intervention represents a relatively unexplored yet important area of infection research, given the frequency with which this site becomes colonized by highly pathogenic microorganisms that cause subsequent sepsis. Our laboratory has focused on the host tissue derived environmental cues that are released into the intestinal tract d Read More

The pathological DNA-specific B cells in Systemic lupus erythematosus are a logical target for a selected therapeutic intervention. It has been recently shown that complement receptor type 1 on human B and T-lymphocytes has suppressive activity. The cocrosslinking of this receptor with the B-cell receptor (BCR) inhibits B cell activation and proliferation and it could be an attractive new target for negative signal delivery. E Read More

Natural products and their derivatives have historically been invaluable as a source of therapeutic agents and have contributed to the discovery of antimicrobial agents. However, today with the development of drug-resistant strains, new scaffolds and new sources of bioactive compounds are needed. To this end, plant derived natural resins are reviewed for their potential application as antimicrobial agents. Natural gums, extra Read More

Traditional antimicrobials are increasingly suffering from the emergence of multidrug resistance among pathogenic microorganisms. To overcome these deficiencies, a range of novel approaches to control microbial infections are under investigation as potential alternative treatments. Multidrug efflux is a key target of these efforts. Efflux mechanisms are broadly recognized as major components of resistance to many classes of Read More

Antimicrobial photodynamic therapy (aPDT) is an emerging alternative to antibiotics motivated by growing problems with multi-drug resistant pathogens. aPDT uses non-toxic dyes or photosensitizers (PS) in combination with harmless visible of the correct wavelength to be absorbed by the PS. The excited state PS can form a long-lived triplet state that can interact with molecular oxygen to produce reactive oxygen species s Read More