Medicinal Chemistry, Drug Discovery & Drug Delivery

ChemBioChem-Antimicrobials and Infectious Agents & Diseases

A major challenge in medicine and the biomedical sciences today is the problem of antibiotic resistance, the phenomenon by which agents of infectious diseases – bacteria being most relevant to this article – no longer respond to treatment with the ‘miracle drugs’. Let’s understand this phenomenon by tracing the roles of infectious diseases in human history; our approaches to understanding and treating them over millennia; the recent use and abuse of antibiotics and the resultant spread of antibiotic resistance; the antiquity of antibiotics in natural environments and the inevitability of resistance; and the way forward.