Objectives

Project Summary

The introduction of antibiotics in the medical practice has drastically reduced illness and death from infectious diseases. However, bacteria have exhibited a remarkable capacity to become resistant to commonly used antibacterial compounds. In parallel to efforts aimed at better understanding the strikingly diverse mechanisms they use, it is important to design strategies which will allow to counteract them and to search for new targets, ideally essential and specific to bacterial physiology.

The approach followed in EUR-INTAFAR is based on the well established facts that peptidoglycan biosynthesis and cell morphogenesis are related phenomena and that they are totally specific to bacterial cells, without even remotely equivalent processes in eukaryotic cells.
By attempting to interfere with these processes by inhibiting enzyme activities or perturbing protein-protein interactions, one should be able to design new antibacterial compounds active against pathogenic organisms such as streptococci, staphylococci, enterococci or chlamydiae.