Antarctic organisms as a source of antimicrobial compounds: a patent review.

Currently, antimicrobial resistance has become a global public health problem, which has made the need for new antimicrobial compounds to deal with resistant infections an emergency. However, environments that once offered so many innovative molecules, now already exhaustively exploited, do not meet this need. In this context, a geographically isolated, under-explored and extreme environment, such as Antarctica, which holds organisms with unique physiological and biochemical characteristics, assumes great importance as a potential source of new compounds with antimicrobial activity.