Target-based antimicrobial drug discovery.

The continued increase in antibiotic resistance among bacterial pathogens, coupled with a decrease in infectious disease research among pharmaceutical companies, has escalated the need for novel and effective antibacterial chemotherapies. While current agents have emerged almost exclusively from whole-cell screening of natural products and small molecules that cause microbial death, recent advances in target identification and assay development have resulted in a flood of target-driven drug discovery methods. Whether genome-based methodologies will yield new classes of agents that conventional methods have been unable to is yet to be seen.

Virulence as a target for antimicrobial chemotherapy.

Bacterial resistance to present day antibiotics has become a dangerous threat to public health. Consequently, the pharmaceutical industry must provide new agents and novel classes to combat bacterial disease and to stay a step ahead of the rapid evolution of bacterial resistance mechanisms. The need for novel antibacterials has resulted in a search for previously unexplored targets for chemotherapy, utilising the new techniques of genomics to identify them.

Genomics in anti-infective drug discovery--getting to endgame.

Whole chromosome sequence of prokaryotes has provided the availability of multiple bacterial pathogen sequence data and it has become a widely used tool in the drug discovery process. However the sequence data in itself is merely a starting point for drug discovery of novel antibacterial targets and, eventually, drugs. In order to leverage this large amount of data it is necessary to match an understanding of the microbial physiology of pathogenic bacteria to disease processes and identifying the gene products for which intervention may reduce or eliminate the infectious state.