Antimicrobial Peptides: An Approach to Combat Resilient Infections

It was apparent by the end of 1980s that the success against the threats of bacterial pathogens on public health was an illusion, with the rapid development of resistant strains more than the discovery of new drugs. As a consequence, the remedial services were in the backfoot position of being on the losing side of this never-ending evolutionary war. The quest for new antibiotics to overcome resistance problems has long been a top research priority for the researchers and the pharmaceutical industry. However, the resistance problems remain unresolved due to the abrupt misuse of antibiotics by common people, which has immensely worsened the scenario by disseminating antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains around the world.

Thus, immediate action is needed to measure emerging and re-emerging microbial diseases having new resistance mechanisms and to manage their rapid spread among the common public by means of novel alternative metabolites.

Antimicrobial Peptides (AMPs) are short, cationic peptides evolved in a wide range of living organisms and serve as the essential part of the host innate immunity. For humans, these effector molecules either can directly kill the foreign microbes or modulate the host immune systems so that the human body could develop some resistance against the microbial infections. In this review, we discuss their history, structural classifications, modes of action, and explain their biological roles as anti-infective agents. We also scrutinize their clinical potentiality, current limitations in various developmental stages and strategies to overcome for their successful clinical applications.