How to Overcome Resistance?

Resistance to chemotherapy is probably the most serious therapeutic problem confronting medicine in the 21st century. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics, viral resistance to anti-virals (e.g., influenza virus to amantadine, HIV to HAART) and parasites to antiparasitic agents (e.g., malaria to chloroquine, fansidar, etc.) are threats that need to be taken very seriously if our therapeutic armamentarium is to be maintained effective. In this short review bacterial resistance is addressed with emphasis on three modalities to overcome it, namely: vaccines, agents effective against physiological targets of bacterial metabolism and new antibiotics.

[1]  H. Sahl,et al.  Dysregulation of bacterial proteolytic machinery by a new class of antibiotics , 2005, Nature Medicine.

[2]  P. Bradford,et al.  In vitro activity of tigecycline against isolates from patients enrolled in phase 3 clinical trials of treatment for complicated skin and skin-structure infections and complicated intra-abdominal infections. , 2005, Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

[3]  B. Bassler,et al.  Quorum sensing: cell-to-cell communication in bacteria. , 2005, Annual review of cell and developmental biology.

[4]  K. Johnson,et al.  PDF inhibitors: an emerging class of antibacterial drugs. , 2005, Current drug targets. Infectious disorders.

[5]  C. Whitney.  Impact of Conjugate Pneumococcal Vaccines , 2005, The Pediatric infectious disease journal.

[6]  K. Fitzgerald.  RNAi versus small molecules: different mechanisms and specificities can lead to different outcomes. , 2005, Current opinion in drug discovery & development.

[7]  E. Rubinstein,et al.  Tigecycline , 2012, Drugs.