Novel agents to inhibit microbial virulence and pathogenicity

Importance of the field: The rising levels of antibiotic resistance in pathogenic microorganisms create an urgent need for new antimicrobial agents that are not affected by resistance mechanisms already present in the bacterial population. Targeting virulence is one of the alternative approaches to find new molecules to treat infections due to resistant bacteria. Novel strategies to identify these new antimicrobial agents have been reported.Areas covered in this review: A variety of virulence factors are now the target for inhibition mainly in the antibacterial field. This review focuses exclusively on the new virulence inhibitors published in patents (worldwide collection of patents filed) or in the literature since 2006.What the reader will gain: New efficacy in vitro assays have been developed allowing screening of large numbers of molecules. These inhibitors are mainly antibacterial molecules, a few natural products, peptides and antibodies. A growing number of these published studies provide results ...