Drug discovery and design: antimicrobial peptide B1CTcu5 analogs promising against Mycobacterium tuberculosis

Abstract

The emergence of multidrug-resistant bacteria that are resistant to most known antibiotics has resulted in a global health crisis. Thus, new antimicrobial drugs with new modes of action are urgently needed. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are part of the innate immune defense of all multicellular organisms. Current development of AMPs as potential antibiotics is an interesting area of research because these molecules generally are not prone to rapid resistance development. Tuberculosis (TB) is a communicable infectious disease caused mainly by the bacillus Mycobacterium tuberculosis. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), this disease is one of the ten main causes of death in the world, but the main one caused by a single infectious agent, rank-ing above HIV/AIDS. The synthetic peptide B1CTcu5 contists of 21 amino acid residues and was originally isolated from the cutaneous secretion from the frog Clinotarsus curtipes. This pep-tide showed a promising effect (including low toxicity) in an initial study against M. tuberculosis. The objective of this research is to obtain new hybrid, conjugated, and/or complexed peptides derived from B1CTcu5 that can improve the initial MIC-values, that can have greater resistance to degradation in biological systems and that have low toxicity. (AU)