Antifungal drug resistance: evolution, mechanisms and impact.

Microorganisms have a remarkable capacity to evolve resistance to antimicrobial agents, threatening the efficacy of the limited arsenal of antimicrobials and becoming a dire public health crisis. This is of particular concern for fungal pathogens, which cause devastating invasive infections with treatment options limited to only three major classes of antifungal drugs. The paucity of antifungals with clinical utility is in part due to close evolutionary relationships between these eukaryotic pathogens and their human hosts, which limits the unique targets to be exploited therapeutically. This review highlights the mechanisms by which fungal pathogens of humans evolve resistance to antifungal drugs, which provide crucial insights to enable development of novel therapeutic strategies to thwart drug resistance and combat fungal infectious disease.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  Current Opinion in Microbiology

• Publication date

  2018-10-01

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.mib.2018.02.005PMID 29547801PMCID PMC6135714
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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