Antimicrobial Peptides Under Clinical Trials

Today microbial drug resistance has become a serious problem not only within inpatient setting but also within outpatient setting. Repeated intake and unnecessary usage of antibiotics as well as the transfer of resistance genes are the most important factors that make the microorganisms resistant to conventional antibiotics. A large number of antimicrobials successfully used for prophylaxis and therapeutic purposes have now become ineffective [ 1, 2]. Therefore, new molecules are being studied to be used in the treatment of various diseases. Some of these molecules are structural compounds based on a combination of peptides, for example, naturally occurring endogenous peptide antibiotics and their synthetic analogues or molecules designed de novo using QSAR (quantitative structure-property relationships)-based methods [3]. Trying to exploit numerous advantages of antimicrobial peptides such as high potency and selectivity, broad range of targets, potentially low toxicity and low accumulation in tissues, pharmaceutical industry aims to develop them as commercially available drugs and appropriate clinical trials are being conducted [ 4]. In this paper we define clinical trials steps and describe current status of several antimicrobial peptides under clinical development as well as briefly depict peptide drug formulation.