Microbes and Medicines

Dear Colleagues,

In part, the US Food and Drug Administration defines a drug as “A substance intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease.” While there is a tendency to think of drugs as chemicals, historically, many drugs were originally discovered as products of living organisms including bacteria and other microbes. Penicillin and many other antibiotics are derived from fungal and bacterial compounds.  Early statins were first isolated from Penicillium and Aspergillus fungi. The chemotherapy agent doxorubicin and the antiparasitic drug avermectin (a precursor of ivermectin) were both isolated from Streptomyces species. More recently, microbes are beginning to be used as drugs as in the case of phage therapy and fecal microbiota transplants. 

In this Special Issue of Drugs and Drug Candidates, we are seeking articles that explore recent uses of microbes as sources of new drugs and as drugs themselves.  Articles should fall within the scope of the journal including, but not limited to, papers on:

• Development of new drugs (including microbes) for treating diseases;
• Studies of genes that could be potential targets for therapeutic agents;
• Novel strategies for discovering new drugs;
• Discovery of new genes that regulate clinically relevant antibiotics and metabolites;
• Microbiome modification approaches;
• Strategies to overcome antimicrobial agent resistance;
• In vitro and in vivo model evaluation and efficacy testing.

Both review and research articles are sought. Please reach out to the Guest Editors for questions concerning whether a paper will fit this Special Issue. 

Prof. Dr. Paul Hyman
Dr. Jennifer A. Bennett
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Drugs and Drug Candidates is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• antibiotics
• antibiotic discovery
• antibiotic resistance (or antimicrobial resistance)
• drug design
• drug discovery
• medical microbiology
• microbiology
• microbes
• microbiome
• phage therapy