Identification and Validation of Novel Drug Targets for Anti-Infective Therapy

Infectious diseases remain a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, and antimicrobial resistance is making an already difficult problem considerably worse. The pipeline of new anti-infective drugs is thin, and resistance is spreading across bacterial, viral, fungal, and parasitic pathogens. A recurring bottleneck is not just the optimization of existing compounds, but the limited number of well-validated molecular targets that are both essential to pathogen survival and sufficiently distinct from host biology to allow selective intervention.This Research Topic focuses on that upstream problem: the identification and validation of novel drug targets across the full spectrum of infectious disease, spanning bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites. The emphasis is on target biology: understanding why a given molecular structure, pathway, or interaction is worth pursuing, and what evidence supports its therapeutic relevance. It also considers approaches developed against such validated targets that have been, or could be, translated into clinical interventions.Some of the most tractable directions lie outside the pathways already under pressure from existing drugs. Enzymatic pathways and components unique to the pathogen are one example. Signaling pathways with no mammalian equivalent are another, since the absence of a host counterpart simplifies the selectivity problem. Virulence factors and host-pathogen interaction machinery present a different angle: impairing a pathogen’s ability to cause disease, rather than killing it outright, may reduce the selective pressure that drives resistance, an approach that has attracted interest across bacterial and fungal pathogens. Efflux systems are a further example, studied across several pathogen classes, where inhibitors can restore susceptibility to existing antibiotics without needing to meet the same activity threshold themselves. Vaccine oriented approaches against infectious diseases involving antigen discovery, antigen validation, reverse vaccinology, immunoinformatics and the design of vaccine against infectious diseases using validated targets. Host-directed strategies add another layer, targeting host factors that pathogens depend on or subvert and thereby reducing direct selective pressure on the pathogen itself. Contributions are invited across all pathogen classes and disease contexts, including zoonotic diseases and public health challenges. Areas of interest include target identification and validation, and the discovery and optimization of inhibitors through structure-based drug design, ligand- and fragment-based approaches, and high-throughput screening. Also welcome are the characterization of underexplored enzymatic or protein targets, virulence factor biology as a basis for therapeutic intervention, host-pathogen interaction networks, and compound repurposing against new molecular targets. Computational and artificial intelligence-based approaches are welcome when applied to target discovery or characterization, antigen discovery and vaccine design, or identification of anti-infectives preferably backed by in vitro or in vivo evidence. Work on WHO-priority pathogens and neglected tropical diseases is particularly encouraged.This Research Topic does not consider meta-analyses or retrospective studies, in line with the editorial policy of the Pharmacology of Infectious Diseases section.The following manuscript types are accepted: original research articles, systematic reviews, narrative reviews, mini-reviews, perspectives, and hypothesis and theory articles. All submissions must fall within the scope of Frontiers in Pharmacology and comply with the journal’s author guidelines. Topic editors: VIKRANT SINGH RAJPUT, Harvinder Kour Khera, Chitra Rani Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/83624/identification-and-validation-of-novel-drug-targets-for-anti-infective-therapy