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.
