Combating Antifungal-Resistant and -Tolerant Fungi in the Clinic
A special issue of Antibiotics (ISSN 2079-6382). This special issue belongs to the section "Antibiotics Use and Antimicrobial Stewardship".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2021) | Viewed by 561
Special Issue Editors
Interests: mycology; bacteriology; hospital hygiene
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: antifungal resistance; antifungal tolerance; diagnosis of antifungal resistance; tolerance in the clinic
Special Issue Information
Dear colleagues,
It is my great pleasure to announce a Special Issue on drug-resistant and -tolerant fungi in humans.
As a human commensal inhabiting mucosal surfaces and ubiquitously encountered in the environment, fungal species (yeasts and molds) are associated with superficial and invasive infections in humans.
Treatment with systemic antifungal drugs has lowered the mortality rates posed by IFIs. Yet, the emergence of drug-resistant and multidrug-resistant (MDR) fungi combined with the limited antifungal armamentarium poses a serious threat to contemporary medicine for the management of invasive infections caused by fungi. It is further recognized that drug tolerance can lead to increased colonization and a greater potential for genetically stable drug resistance through the acquisition of resistance mechanisms.
The MDR Candida glabrata and Candida auris and azole-resistant Aspergillus fumigatus, Candida parapsilosis, and Candida tropicalis are increasingly being identified in clinical settings. Furthermore, rare molds are often drug resistant. Patients infected with the aforementioned species show therapeutic failure, which leads to treatment complications, longer hospitalization duration, higher healthcare costs, and potentially poorer outcomes including death.
Therefore, in this current issue, we aim at highlighting the burden of invasive fungal infections in humans and how drug-resistant and -tolerant fungi have complicated management of IFIs caused by such species.
We encourage papers with a major focus on:
- Mechanisms underlying antifungal resistance and tolerance
- New antifungal agents
- The application of antifungal stewardship in clinic and its association with the burden of drug-resistant fungi
- New methods to improve the current antifungal susceptibility and tolerance testing protocols to rapidly identify drug-resistant/ tolerant fungi
Moreover, review papers describing the burden of drug resistance and the underlying mechanisms in emerging fungal species are welcome and we encourage reaching out to Dr. Amir Arastehfar.
Keywords
- antifungal resistance
- antifungal tolerance
- identification of antifungal resistance and tolerance
- new antifungal agents
- antifungal stewardship
