Antimicrobial and Antibacterial Agents

Microorganisms in Recent Drug Discovery

Environmental microbes are a significant source of drug discovery, and several microbial products (anti-tumor products, immunosuppressant, antibiotics and others) are routinely used for human therapy. Most of these products were obtained from cultivable environmental microbes, and this means that the vast majority of microbes were not targeted for drug discovery. With the advent of new and emerging technologies, we are poised to harvest novel drugs from the so-called 'uncultivable' microbes. In this article, we propose how a multidisciplinary approach combining different technologies can expedite and revolutionize drug discovery from uncultivable microbes and examine the current limitations of technologies and strategies to overcome such limitations that might further expand the promise of drugs from environmental microbes.