Recent Status and Advancements in the development of Antifungal Agents: Highlights on Plant and Marine Based Antifungals.

Abstract

The developing resistant in fungai has become the key challenge, which is being faced nowadays towards the available antifungal agents in the market. Further search for novel compounds from different sources have been explored to meet this problem. The current review describes and highlights recent advancement in the drug production from from plant and marine based sources. The current available antifungal agents act on specific targets on the fungal cell wall, like ergosterol synthesis, chitin biosynthesis, sphingolipid synthesis, glucan synthesis etc. We discuss some of the important anti-fungal agents like azole, polyene and allylamine classes that inhibit the ergosterol biosynthesis. Echinocandins inhibit β-1, 3 glucan synthesis in fungal cell wall. The antifungals poloxins and nikkomycins inhibit fungal cell wall component chitin. Apart from these classes of drugs, several combinatorial therapies have been carried out to treat diseases due to fungal resistance. Recently many antifungal agents derived from plant and marine sources showed potent activity. The renewed interest in plant and marine derived compounds for the fungal diseases created a new way to treat these resistant strains which is evident from the numerous literature publications in recent years. Moreover, the compounds derived from both plant and marine sources showed promising results against fungal diseases. Altogether, this review article discusses the current antifungal agents and highlights the plant and marine based compounds as a potential promising antifungal agents.