In Silico Drug Repurposing for MDR Bacteria: Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract The prevalence of multidrug resistance among clinical pathogens has posed a huge challenge for healthcare providers and the scientific community. The reports of MDR pathogen related incidence are fairly common in developing and developed countries around the world. The antibiotics available for bacterial diseases are losing their efficacy against newly reported MDR strains. Virtual screening and drug repurposing offer great opportunities for new drug discovery by shortening the time involved in drug development. The availability of enormous amounts of genomic and proteomic data at the cellular and metagenomic levels presents a unique opportunity to the scientific community to trace new targets in whole cell perturbations for existing drug molecules—or adverse drug reactions—and the same may be employed to devise new strategies for mounting an all-around attack against resistant pathogens. This chapter provides a synopsis of useful online databases for drug repurposing against antibiotic resistance strains and briefly mentions the challenges of computational analysis for future improvements.