Novel Strategies to Combat Antimicrobial Resistance

Infectious diseases form the major health-care burden for the developing world and antimicrobials prove to be the magical drugs to combat this. The discovery of antimicrobial agents was boon for the global health-care system and the wonderful cure by antimicrobials shifted the disease trends from infectious to life-style diseases in the developed world. Sudden appearance of the antimicrobial resistance hampered the whole success; and this situation is further complicated by the dry pipeline of antimicrobial development. Now, this is heading the world towards the “preantibiotic” era. The development of new antimicrobials is not able to match pace with the speedily growing antimicrobial resistance. Development of new active pharmaceutical principles is a difficult and costly practice. The other approach to achieve the same is by rejuvenating the existing antimicrobials. These contemporary novel approaches include bacteriophage therapy, fecal microbiota transplantation, antimicrobial peptides, combination drug therapy and antimicrobial adjuvants to combat antimicrobial resistance forms the main stay of discussion of this article.