What is it about?
Resistance to antibiotics is increasing globally, to the point where some infections do not have an effective drug, compromising patients' recovery. Discovery and development of new antimicrobials is a very long and costly process. Very few new drugs have been approved commercially in the last 20 years. Here, we use a new strategy to minimize time and costs for the discovery of new drugs. By using computer-assisted software and the huge amount of information present in some specific data banks, we were able to screen drugs already investigated to be used in other diseases that could be tested as antibiotics. Since these drugs have already been studied before, their pharmacological properties are available and thus do not require to be performed again, thus reducing time and costs. By using this strategy we shortened in a few years the time to discover new drugs with activity against an important bacteria that causes infections, Acinetobacter baumannii.
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Why is it important?
Very few antibiotics have been marketed in the last few years. Their discovery and production process is lengthy and costly. Here, we show that our strategy can result in important drugs with antibiotic activity much more quickly and at lower costs.
Perspectives
Based on our strategy and findings, many others will be able to pursue the discovery of new drugs for various bacterial, viral, fungal, or parasite infections. The drug we have found with the best activity against Acinetobacter baumannii is tavaborole. We believe that with further investigations, it will soon be shown to be a candidate drug for Acinetobacter baumannii infections.
Andre Kipnis
Universidade Federal de Goias
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: New antibacterial candidates against Acinetobacter baumannii discovered by in silico-driven chemogenomics repurposing, PLoS ONE, September 2024, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0307913.
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