One cannot rule them all: Are bacterial toxins-antitoxins druggable?

Chan, Wai Ting; Balsa, Dolors; Espinosa, Manuel

One of the hurdles to overcome in designing new drugs is how to deliver them to the appropriate tissue target. Research in drug delivery is multidisciplinary, requiring knowledge of (i) how drugs work, (ii) their chemical and physical properties, (iii) how these properties affect the in vivo behaviour of the drugs, (iv) how these drugs reach their targets and (vi) what could be done to formulate these drugs to potentially solve any delivery problems associated with them. Therefore, drug delivery research necessitates interdisciplinary collaborations both at a national and international level. Although a range of delivery systems is available, the delivery of sensitive drugs such as peptides, nucleic acid-based therapeutics (including antisense RNA and small interfering RNAs), simple and complex carbohydrates, and synthetic vaccines presents a major challenge to the pharmaceutical industry. Formulation for novel molecules and drug delivery are very costly, since nearly 10% of the costs of drug development are devoted to these area (Allen and Cullis 2012). Some of the above-mentioned biologics could be formulated in ways that can be expensive or inconvenient: for instance, replacement of powders with ready-to-use liquids may be an important improvement, but storage of the material (cold versus shelf storage) may constitute an important bias against employment of proteins, so that improving heat stability will lead to simpler transportation and distribution processes.