Antimicrobial drug discovery, screening predicts the clinical outcome?
Juan Gabriel Bueno
Grupo de Micobacterias, Instituto Nacional de Salud, Avenida calle 26 No. 51-20 Zona 6 CAN Bogotá, D.C., Colombia
Abstract:
Antimicrobial drug screening is an important tool for develop new antibiotics, actually there is an urgent need for the development of novel, more effective antibiotic drugs, with new mechanisms of action to combat emerging drug-resistant bacterial pathogens such as penicillin-resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae, vancomycin-resistant enterococci, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, multi-drug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Acinetobacter baumanii. For that reason the screening protocols must be optimized for to evaluate a broad amount of chemical libraries. Unfortunately the ideal in vitro antimicrobial screening platform to able to detect compounds activity is so far. One hundred year since of magic bullet, the animal model is the best way for to find new antimicrobials with clinical potential. The use of live, infected whole animals to screen for antimicrobial compounds advances the established paradigm for identifying antibiotics in several key ways. First, the whole animal approach directly assesses drug efficacy in vivo, discarding compounds toxic to the host early in the analysis. Also, unlike conventional in vitro screens, this strategy can identify compounds that target the processes by which microbes establish infections, specifically mechanisms that are only manifest when the complex host/pathogen relationship is intact. But is possible convert this model in a robust and automatable model? With the potential to solve the bottleneck of toxicity/efficacy testing in drug development.
