Antimicrobial peptides: an overview of a promising class of therapeutics

By A. Giuliani, G. Pirri, S. F. Nicoletto. Central European Journal of Biology, 2007

614 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Antibiotic resistance is increasing at a rate that far exceeds the pace of new development of drugs. Antimicrobial peptides, both synthetic and from natural sources, have raised interest as pathogens become resistant against conventional antibiotics. Indeed, one of the major strengths of this class of molecules is their ability to kill multidrug-resistant bacteria. Antimicrobial peptides are relatively small (6 to 100 aminoacids), amphipathic molecules of variable length, sequence and structure with activity against a wide range of microorganisms including bacteria, protozoa, yeast, fungi, viruses and even tumor cells. They usually act through relatively non-specific mechanisms resulting in membranolytic activity but they can also stimulate the innate immune response. Several peptides have already entered pre-clinical and clinical trials for the treatment of catheter site infections, cystic fibrosis, acne, wound healing and patients undergoing stem cell transplantation. We review the advantages of these molecules in clinical applications, their disadvantages including their low in vivo stability, high costs of production and the strategies for their discovery and optimization.

Subfields: Ecology, Microbiology, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4ea38d392bb9707a91a968aa27e68dedd26b3b5c

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Citations in the corpus

Antimicrobial peptides: key components of the innate immune system (2012, background): “…various strategies have been proposed, including cyclisation, use of nonnatural amino acids (Goodman et al., 2001; Adessi and Soto, 2002; Giuliani et al., 2007), amidation at the N-terminus (Stromstedt et al., 2009), introduction of disulphide bonds (Peschel and Sahl, 2006), preventing…”
Antimicrobial Peptides: An Emerging Category of Therapeutic Agents (2016, background): “Electrostatic forces between the cationic AMPs and the negatively charged bacterial surface are critical determinants for this interaction between peptides and microbial membrane (Yeaman and Yount, 2003; Giuliani et al., 2007; Yeung et al., 2011; Ebenhan et al., 2014).”
CAMP: a useful resource for research on antimicrobial peptides (2009, background): “AMPs also exhibit a high composition of hydrophobic residues (5).”
From antimicrobial to anticancer peptides. A review (2013, background): “A review”
iAMP-2L: a two-level multi-label classifier for identifying antimicrobial peptides and their functional types. (2013, background): “of activity and the short contact time required for inducing killing, AMPs have been considered as excellent candidates for developing novel therapeutic agents [3,4].”
Studies on anticancer activities of antimicrobial peptides. (2008, background): “Several AMPs have already entered pre-clinical and clinical trials to promote wound healing and for the treatment of cystic fibrosis, catheter site infections, acne, and patients undergoing stem cell transplantation [14-16].”