Adjuvant drug therapy to overcome antibiotic resistances : drug target evaluation in multidrug resistant pathogens

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the biggest threats to human health globally. Alarmingly, multidrug resistant, extensively drug resistant and even pan drug resistant pathogens have emerged worldwide and constantly spread in healthcare centers. These bacteria are resistant to most, if not all currently available antibiotics. If no actions are taken to tackle the antimicrobial resistance issue there is a high risk to enter into a post-antibiotic era, where standard surgeries provide a high risk to the patient and people died from simple infections due to a lack of treatment options. In the last decades, many big pharmaceutical companies pulled away from antibiotic discovery due to a lower expectation of profits compared to other therapeutic areas, leading to empty pipelines and a lack of innovation in the antibiotic field. To overcome this development gap, novel innovative therapeutic strategies may be needed. Adjuvant drug therapy to overcome antibiotic resistances is one of these innovative approaches. This therapy combines an antibiotic with an adjuvant drug, which specifically switches off the resistance mechanisms directed against the antibiotic. Such approach can potentially expand the life time of antibiotics by switching off an already developed resistance path or by delaying the onset of resistance. This work aimed to investigate the adjuvant therapy approach in Acinetobacter baumannii and Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which are two pathogens of great importance with constantly increasing drug resistance rates.