Bacterial Carbonic Anhydrases as Drug Targets

All microorganisms that cause diseases or illnesses to their host are defined as pathogens. Many of them belong to the Bacteria. In this chapter, we will review the current state of the art for inhibiting bacterial carbonic anhydrases (CAs, EC 4.2.1.1) with the goal of developing antibacterial agents possessing a different mechanism of action compared with the clinically used antibiotics, to which a considerable degree of drug resistance has been reported. Cloning the genomes of many pathogenic bacteria offered the possibility of exploring alternative pathways for inhibiting virulence factors or proteins essential for their life cycle, and such an approach was applied systematically for CAs from bacteria. Investigations of CAs in this domain already revealed novel aspects of microbial virulence, these efforts being part of a more general approach of using metalloenzyme inhibitors for designing novel classes of anti-infectives, but more significant developments are undoubtedly to be expected. Bacterial CAs represent at this moment very promising targets for obtaining anti-infectives devoid of the resistance problems of the clinically used antibiotics, but further studies are needed to validate these and other less investigated enzymes as novel drug targets.