Development of Drug Resistance

The phenomenon of drug resistance is a widely acknowledged problem in clinics. Drug resistance not only increases the treatment time, but also paves the way for testing the maximum limit of dose tolerance of antibiotics in the patient. There is no escaping of the fact that drug tolerance may remain a perpetual problem and bacteria will keep on evolving as a part of the natural selection process. Therefore, novel drugs targeting the novel mechanism of action could be a proposed solution for this problem. The mechanism of action includes efflux pump, alteration/modification of drug target, enzyme inactivation and prevention of drug penetration. The other thing is to avoid the unnecessary usage of antibiotics so that the bacteria living inside the body do not develop resistance. The places where antibiotics can be bought for human or animal use without a prescription, the emergence and spread of resistance are made worse. Similarly, in countries without standard treatment guidelines, antibiotics are often overprescribed by health workers and veterinarians and over-used by the public. Therefore, this unregulated overuse of antibiotics may lead to an era where normal infection may become difficult to treat and could lead to mortality. The maintenance of hygiene is a must for everyone and it is the only way to get rid of pathogenic bacteria. So, in this chapter, we summarize recent literature on the development of drug resistance, their mechanism of actions used by microbes to develop antibiotic resistance, factors determining their development by infective agents and the spread of resistant bacteria. 

Keywords: Antibiotics, Bacteria, Drug resistance