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+--- Thread: Fungi battle: hard-to-treat systemic fungal infections on the rise (/thread-9877.html)
Fungi battle: hard-to-treat systemic fungal infections on the rise - C C - Mar 2, 2021
https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/drug-discovery/fight-against-fungi-antifungal/99/i7
EXCERPT: . . . Krysan recalled one young patient he’d seen months before with a mold growth that was eating away at her jaw. Krysan had to explain to her family that there were no medicines that could treat the infection. Surgery was their only option. “You basically try to cut out as much as you can,” Krysan says. “And then hope.” The girl died.
It’s just one tragic example of a growing problem: systemic fungal infections are becoming more common, and doctors’ meager medical options for treating them are increasingly ineffective. “Our society has a lot of trust in our ability to do pretty amazing things with technology, but we have real holes,” Krysan says. “I would argue that there’s no part of medicine that has made as little progress in the last 35 to 40 years than the treatment of fungal infections.”
But there is some good news. A handful of scientists in academia and at small companies are working to increase the power of the antifungal stockpile. They’re designing drugs to go after new antifungal targets, creating new classes of drugs to attack existing targets, and modifying antifungal drugs to make them more selective or easier to take. The success or failure of these compounds, both as viable fungal fighters and as pharmaceutical investments, will become apparent in the next couple of years as they face approval from regulators and a tough marketplace for anti-infectives... (MORE - details)