Antifungal agents: mechanisms of action, resistance and new strategies for drug development

Published on April 30, 2023   44 min

A selection of talks on Pharmaceutical Sciences

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0:00
Hello. My name is Dee Carter. I'm a professor of microbiology at the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney, New South Wales, here in Australia. The topic I'm going to talk to you about today is antifungal agents, their mechanisms of action, resistance, and new strategies for drug development.
0:21
To give you a general overview of the talk today, what we're going to go through is first we're going to talk about why it's difficult to discover new antifungal agents. Then we'll go through the classes of existing antifungal agents, looking a bit at their structure, their activity, and their efficacy. We'll take a look at the problems that these current antifungal agents have. And then we'll take a look at drug resistance, we'll see how we can test for resistance, we'll see the molecular mechanisms behind resistance, and we'll talk a bit about multi-drug resistance. Then finally, we'll talk a bit about how we can go about potentially developing new antifungal therapies. So, we'll look at new targets and new drugs, we'll look at repurposing of existing drugs, and we'll look at synergy with other antifungals and with other agents, as well.
1:09
Based on this lecture, you should be able to know at the end, first of all, why it's difficult to develop new antifungals and why they're often toxic, the four different classes of antifungal drugs and a bit about how they work, some of the problems that these current antifungals have, the different types of antifungal drug resistance and the mechanisms of resistance in those different classes, some of the concepts behind developing new drugs, including developing novel drugs, enhancing existing drugs, and repurposing non-antifungal drugs, and finally, the various ways in which drugs can act synergistically.
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Antifungal agents: mechanisms of action, resistance and new strategies for drug development

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