Mining Chemical Libraries for New Antibacterials

Despite the promise of target-based drug discovery ushered in by the genomics era, no mechanistically novel rationally designed antibiotic has reached clinically utility to address the threat of multi-drug resistant bacterial pathogens. Phenotypic screening remains the primary source for new antibacterial compounds, which mainly come from mining various chemical libraries. In this webinar, Carl Balibar (Merck Research Laboratories) discussed screen design, target bias, and hit-prioritization strategies to identify those entities with the greatest opportunity to be developed into the next new antibiotic.