Quorum Sensing Inhibitors as Anti-Pathogenic Drugs in the Fight Against Pseudomonas aeruginosa Infections

The increasing of antibiotic resistance among clinically P. aeruginosa strains determined researchers to find out new alternatives to antibiotic treatment. The newest strategy in therapeutics development is represented by an alternative approach which aims to target functions essential for infection, such as virulence factors required to cause host damage and disease. This approach has several potential advantages including expanding the repertoire of bacterial targets, preserving the host endogenous microbiome, and exerting less selective pressure, which may result in decreased resistance [1]. Most efforts to inhibit the regulation of virulence factors expression have focused on interfering with quorum sensing (QS). Because of the significant role of QS in the regulation of hundreds of virulence factors in P. aeruginosa, significant efforts have been made to discover compounds with inhibitory activity of QS systems, that could stay to the base of an anti-pathogenic strategy, since they will inhibit the coordinated expression of virulence determinants, without interfering with bacterial growth, being less likely to generate resistance [2]. Many studies that have shown that deletion of one or more QS genes result in reduced P. aeruginosa virulence compared with the wild-type P. aeruginosa [3].