Antifungal drug development: the identification of new targets.

With the increasing prevalence of life-threatening systemic fungal infections in the human population, there is a need to develop new, more-effective antifungal agents. This, in turn, will depend upon the identification and exploitation of new antifungal targets--aspects of fungal cytology, metabolism and gene expression which are important for fungal pathogenesis, but which have no mammalian host counterpart. Such new targets have been identified through a combination of classical genetic, cytological and biochemical studies and are reviewed here, as is the potential for applying recombinant DNA techniques as a means of confirming the role of the identified gene products in pathogenesis.