Antimicrobial Drug Discovery Approaches, Challenges, and Development

The need for the identification of novel antimicrobial agents is greater than ever due to the emergence of multidrug resistance (MDR) among clinically important pathogens which pose serious threats to public health worldwide. Unfortunately, the pace of discovery and development of new antimicrobial agents to treat MDR infection has significantly slowed down. Identifying new targets and chemical classes is not easy, and reinvestigating old strategies by testing new compounds on known targets and expecting novel outcomes, seems not only a failure but a border on insanity. The development of new antimicrobial agents, chiefly those with novel mechanism(s) of action, remains essential, but this alone does not guarantee success. It is important to explore diverse information from multiple strategies, including multi-omics, bioinformatics, system biology and other non-conventional approaches. In this chapter, we give a brief background on the importance of antimicrobial drug discovery, detail several discovery platforms from target-based discovery to the current innovative strategy being evaluated, and list the challenges alongside each platform.