Saad Alghamdi

By Saad Alghamdi and Mohammad Asif

Infectious diseases originate from pathogens and increased severely in current years. Despite numerous important advances in antimicrobial therapy, the extensive use and misuse of these antimicrobial drugs have caused the emergence of microbial resistance, which is a serious risk to public health. In particular, the emergence of multidrug-resistant pathogens has become a serious difficulty in the therapy of pathogenic diseases. Therefore, the progress of novel drugs to deal with resistant pathogens has become one of the most essential areas of antimicrobial research today. In addition to the development of novel and efficient antimicrobial agents against multidrug-resistant pathogens, recent attention has focused on the treatment of tuberculosis. Therefore, recent developments have been directed towards examining currently used and newly developed antimycobacterial drugs and their toxicities and mechanism of action.

Part of the book: Molecular Epidemiology Study of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis Complex

By Radi Alsafi, Saad Alghamdi and Mohammad Asif

Viruses are the major pathogenic agents that cause various diseases. Antiviral drugs are used for the treatment of viral infections. Emergent advances of antiviral drugs are focused on two different approaches: targeting the host cell factors or the viruses themselves. Antiviral drugs that directly target the viruses include virus entry inhibitors, virus attachment inhibitors, uncoating inhibitors, protease inhibitors, polymerase inhibitors, nucleoside inhibitors, integrase inhibitors, and nucleotide reverse transcriptase. The protease inhibitors, viral DNA polymerase, and integrase inhibitors are the most commonly used antiviral drugs. Still, there are no effective antiviral drugs existing for several viral infections. Coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) or SARS-CoV-2 is the newest member of the coronavirus family. No specific drugs particularly antiviral drugs have been approved for the treatment of COVID-19. Thus, it is extremely crucial to identify new drugs for the treatment of the COVID-19 outbreak. Various antiviral drugs are used for COVID-19 treatment. Currently, various drugs are under investigation to treat COVID-19 patients. Promising clinical outcomes for COVID-19 can be obtained by using alpha-interferon, remdesivir, lopinavir-ritonavir, favipiravir, ribavirin, umifenovir, oseltamivir, etc. Here, we reviewed anti-COVID-19 potencies of currently available antiviral drugs, and some antiviral drugs have been effective or prevent the spread of coronavirus.

Part of the book: Antiviral Drugs