Anti-Infective Polypeptides for Combating Bacterial and Viral Infections

Abstract: Bacterial and viral infections are still a major threat of human health. The increasing resistance of bacterial isolates to common antibiotics and the lack of new compounds reaching the clinic leading to serious problems in health care. The variability of different virus families with individual entry pathways and replication strategies make the development of suitable therapeutics with cross-species activity complicated. Furthermore, the infections often cause each other, so that an initial virus infection is frequently accompanied by a bacterial ‘superinfection’ with severe consequences. We developed a new class of compounds based on polypeptides, which exhibit broad-spectrum antiviral activity with simultaneous inhibition of important bacterial *Address correspondence to Klaus Brandenburg: Forschungszentrum Borstel, Leibniz-Zentrum for Medicine and Biosciences, Parkallee 10, D-23845 Borstel, Germany; Tel: +49-4537-1882350; Fax: +49-4537-1886320; E-mail: kbrandenburg@fz-borstel.de