Mario Antonio Bianchet
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, USA
Title: Structure based drug design to address bacterial antibiotic resistance
Biography
Biography: Mario Antonio Bianchet
Abstract
The infection of susceptible individuals with pathogens resistant to conventional antimicrobials is becoming worrisome. In addition to per se highly antibiotic resistant spp. such as Clostridium difficile, the namely ESKAPE (Enterococcus faecium, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumanii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Enterobacter spp.) family of pathogens are capable to develop resistance not only to common antibiotics in clinical use if not to those consider of the last resort (like as carbapenems). New antimicrobial drugs must replace antibiotics that lose their effectiveness. Development of pharmacological therapies to address antibiotic resistance or any other medical affliction through trial and error is a time-consuming and costly proposition. Structure-based rational drug design accelerates drug discovery by linking together structural information, computational techniques, high-throughput screening and combinatorial chemistry. Common mechanisms of antimicrobial resistance that could be addressed by a structure-based rational design approaches to address this threat will be discussed.