Fighting bacterial infections—Future treatment options

This review summarizes ongoing research aimed at finding novel drugs as alternatives to traditional antibiotics. Anti-virulence approaches, phage therapy and therapeutic antibodies are strategies that may yield drugs with high specificity and narrow spectra. Several candidates are currently being evaluated in clinical trials, mostly for topical applications, but so far, none have been approved for market authorization. Candidates based on antimicrobial peptides (natural, semisynthetic and synthetic) are also being tested in clinical trials, mostly for the topical treatment of chronic infections. An alternative to the development of new antibiotics is to find potentiators of traditional antibiotics; in this respect, beta-lactamase inhibitors are already in clinical use. Novel variants are under investigation as well as efflux pump inhibitors.