In pursuit of the ideal antifungal agent for Candida infections: high-throughput screening of small molecules

• Recent epidemiological changes of candidiasis highlight the need for novel antifungal classes.
• Ideally new antifungal classes should avoid the limitations of the existing ones.
• The slow progress of antifungal drug discovery is attributed to the difficulty of finding new potential drug targets.
• High-throughput screening of small molecules offers a promising approach.

Candida infections have created a great burden on the public healthcare sector. The situation is worsened by recent epidemiological changes. Furthermore, the current arsenal of antifungal agents is limited and associated with undesirable drawbacks. Therefore, new antifungal agents that surpass the existing ones are urgently needed. High-throughput screening of small molecule libraries enables rapid hit identification and, possibly, increases hit rate. Moreover, the identified hits could be associated with unrecognized or multiple drug targets, which would provide novel insights into the biological processes of the pathogen. Hence, it is proposed that high-throughput screening of small molecules is particularly important in the pursuit of the ideal antifungal agents for Candida infections.