Metal Complexes as Antimicrobial Agents

The treatment of infectious diseases still remains an important and challenging problem because of a combination of factors including emerging infectious diseases and the increasing number of multi-drug resistant microbial pathogens. In spite of a large number of antibiotics and chemotherapeutics available for medical use, at the same time the emergence of old and new antibiotic resistance created in the last decades revealed a substantial medical need for new classes of antimicrobial agents. There is a real perceived need for the discovery of new compounds endowed with antimicrobial activity, possibly acting through mechanism of action, which is distinct from those of well-known classes of antimicrobial agents to which many clinically relevant pathogens are now resistant.