Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are promising novel antibiotics since they have shown antimicrobial activity against a wide range of bacterial species, including multiresistant bacteria; however, toxicity is the major barrier to convert antimicrobial peptides into active drugs. A profound and proper understanding of the complex interactions between these peptides and biological membranes using biophysical tools and model membranes seems to be a key factor in the race to develop a suitable antimicrobial peptide therapy for clinical use. In the search for such therapy, different combined approaches with conventional antibiotics have been evaluated in recent years and demonstrated to improve the therapeutic potential of AMPs. Some of these approaches have revealed promising additive or synergistic activity between AMPs and chemical antibiotics. This review will give an insight into the possibilities that physicochemical tools can give in the AMPs research and also address the state of the art on the current promising combined therapies between AMPs and conventional antibiotics, which appear to be a plausible future opportunity for AMPs treatment.

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Antibiotic resistance is one of the main problems concerning public health or clinical practice. Antimicrobial peptides appear as good candidates for the development of new therapeutic drugs. In this study we de novo designed a group of cationic antimicrobial peptides, analyzed its physicochemical properties, including its structure by circular dichroism and studied its antimicrobial properties against a panel of clinical isolates expressing different mechanisms of resistance. Three cationic alpha helical peptides exhibited antimicrobial activity comparable to, or even better than the comparator omiganan (MBI-226).