Novel antimicrobial compounds identified using synthetic combinatorial library technology.

The recent emergence of combinatorial chemistry has greatly advanced the development of biologically active lead compounds. It is anticipated that combinatorial library technology will add great value to the fight against drug-resistant bacterial strains, which pose increasingly serious health hazards. Owing to the need to use complex cell-based assays and, in turn, to screen free compounds in solution, the potential use of combinatorial libraries in the field of infectious diseases has not yet been fully explored. Despite these limitations, a number of new antimicrobial and/or antifungal compounds have been successfully identified from pools of millions of other compounds.