Metal compounds as antimicrobial agents: ‘smart’ approaches for discovering new effective treatments

Due to their considerable chemical diversity, metal compounds are attracting increasing and renewed attention from the scientific and medical communities as potential antimicrobial agents to combat the growing problem of antibiotic resistance. The development of metal compounds as antimicrobial agents typically follows classical drug discovery procedures and suffers from the same problems; indeed, these procedures can be very expensive and time-consuming, and carry an intrinsically high risk of failure. Here, we show how some established drug discovery approaches can be conveniently and successfully applied to antimicrobial metal compounds to provide some shortcuts for faster clinical translation of new treatments. Specifically, we refer to (i) drug repurposing, (ii) drug combination and (iii) drug targeting by bioconjugation; some relevant examples will be illustrated.