Infectious Disorders - Drug Targets (Formerly Current Drug Targets - Infectious Disorders) - Volume 7, Issue 3, 2007

The zinc finger proteins have fascinated many research groups because of their modular assembly, broad range of biological functions and more recently because they are attractive targets for antiviral therapy. The zinc finger domain is a very stable structural element whose hallmark is the coordination of a zinc ion by several amino acid residues, usually cysteines and histidines. These structural motifs are associated with pr Read More

Tuberculosis (TB) caused by the pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis continues to be a major worldwide health problem. Lack of compliance to the complex, multi-drug therapy regimen has resulted in multidrug-resistant TB and a need for new drug targets. Siderophore molecules used for iron acquisition are good targets because pathogen survival and virulence is directly related to iron availability. Indeed, a key host defen Read More

The increasing development of bacterial resistance to traditional antibiotics has reached alarming levels, thus necessitating a strong need to develop new antimicrobial agents. These new antimicrobials should possess novel modes of action and/or different cellular targets compared with the existing antibiotics. As a result, new classes of compounds designed to avoid defined resistance mechanisms are undergoing pre clin Read More

The numbers of global infections produced by bacterial strains that are resistant to single and multiple antimicrobial drugs are on the rise. Concomitant with this alarming upward trend, there is a clear downward trend in the intent and determination of pharmaceutical companies to develop novel antimicrobials. One of the pressing goals to confront the twenty first century's public health challenges brought about by t Read More

The emergence of drug resistant mutations in current anti-HIV-1 drug regimens is an important determinant of the eventual drug failure. New drug development strategies that focus on either new targets or novel compounds are therefore critical for future effective viral suppression in HIV-1 infected individuals. Particularly, virus assembly and disassembly are attractive candidate processes for antiviral intervention. HIV-1 caps Read More

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is the etiological agent for tuberculosis in humans. The studies related to survival of this pathogen in the human host and development of drugs against reveal that the organism uses a complex physiology to adapt to the host environment. Many studies were targeted to key enzymes that allow this pathogen to either survive or remain latent within the host. Most of the models, which address t Read More

Human hepatitis B virus (HBV) causes chronic hepatitis disease which is a major public health problem worldwide. HBV has 4 genes encoding viral DNA polymerase, protein X and two structural proteins, the surface and core proteins. HBV DNA polymerase has been a primary target for the development of anti-HBV agents due to its enzymatic nature, and several nucleoside derivatives that inhibit HBV polymerase are current Read More

Pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) has again become a global problem: it infects 2.2 billion people world-wide, caused the deaths of over 3 million last year and will produce over 8 million new cases of TB this coming year. Although effective therapy is widely available for antibiotic susceptible strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, current drugs are relatively useless against multi-drug resistant infections (MDRTB). Mortality is al Read More

In this review we present our search for the presence of drug targets in several species of human pathogenic parasites, mainly the amoebas Entamoeba histolytica, Acanthamoeba polyphaga and Naegleria fowleri. We started with an analysis of the concepts of essentiality and validity of the targets and continue with a description of the main characteristics of pathogenicity of these amoebas. We then proceed to evaluate Read More