Resistance to β-lactam antibiotics:: Structure and mechanism based design of β-lactamase inhibitors

Resistance to antibiotics is currently a major health concern in treating infectious diseases. The most common mechanism of resistance to beta-lactate antibiotics is the production of beta-lactamases, which destroy beta-lactam antibiotics before they reach the bacterial target. Combination therapy, which involves treatment with a beta-lactam antibiotic and a beta-lactamase inhibitor, has been successfully used to control resistance during last two decades. Due to the lack of effectiveness of the currently available beta-lactamase inhibitors against class C enzymes and new variants of beta-lactamases, there is a need to develop an inhibitor with broad-spectrum activity. Since the discovery of clavulanic acid, there has been an enormous research effort in this area to identify better antibiotic/inhibitor combinations and to understand the molecular bases for interactions between beta-lactate antibiotics, beta-lactamases, and beta-lactamase inhibitors. This review describes some of the structure- and mechanism-based approaches to design of new beta-lactamase inhibitors and the study of probable mechanisms of inhibition using X-ray, electrospray ionization mass spectrometry, and molecular modeling techniques.