Therapeutic Potential of Antimicrobial Peptides

Dear Colleagues,

Infectious diseases represent one of the most pressing global public health challenges and are getting worse nowadays due to the emergence of multidrug-resistant (MDR) microorganisms. These rapidly emerging resistant micropathogens threaten to make our current antibiotics ineffective, leading to higher morbidity and mortality rates. According to the WHO, the pipeline of new antibiotics is stagnant and the number of new drugs in clinical trials has decreased, which has led to an unmet need for new therapeutical potential antimicrobial agents.

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are well known as host-innate defense short peptides. These important biologically active molecules play a broad range of roles in a wide variety of life forms from microorganisms to humans. Because of their advantages over traditional antibiotics and their position as promising alternatives, AMPs have become an emerging category of therapeutic agents that have attracted growing interest in recent years. Many efforts are being made to develop new AMPs with therapeutical potential, including new AMP discovery, identification, screening, and rational design by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), as well as new functional mechanisms of naturally occurring AMPs leading to potentially therapeutic treatment against pathogenic microorganisms. Moreover, there are still some concerns about their stability, and there is limited research in clinical trials.

This Special Issue welcomes researchers to submit their original studies (e.g., new discoveries and advances in AMP research in a variety of areas), comprehensive reviews, and communications related to the aforementioned topics. We believe these can advance our understanding of AMPs’ therapeutical potential, leading to improved strategies for combating antibiotic resistance and infectious diseases caused by multidrug-resistant pathogens.

Dr. Yonghong Zhang
Guest Editor

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