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In recent decades, there has been a significant increase in the number of fungal diseases. This is due to a wide
spectrum of action, immunosuppressants and other group drugs. In terms of frequency, rapid spread and globality, fungal
infections are approaching acute respiratory infections. Antimycotics are medicinal substances endorsed with fungicidal or
fungistatic properties. For the treatment of fungal diseases, several groups of compounds are used that differ in their origin
(natural or synthetic), molecular targets and mechanism of action, antifungal effect (fungicidal or fungistatic), indications
for use (local or systemic infections), methods of administration (parenteral, oral, outdoor). Several efforts have been made
by various medicinal chemists around the world for the development of antifungal drugs with high efficacy with least toxicity and maximum selectivity in the area of antifungal chemotherapy. The pharmacokinetic properties of the new antimycotics are also important: the ability to penetrate biological barriers, be absorbed and distributed in tissues and organs, get
accumulated in tissues affected by micromycetes, drug metabolism in the intestinal microflora and human organs, and in
the kinetics of excretion from the body. There are several ways to search for new effective antimycotics:
- Obtaining new derivatives of the already used classes of antimycotics with improved activity properties.
- Screening of new chemical classes of synthetic antimycotic compounds.
- Screening of natural compounds.
- Identification of new unique molecular targets in the fungal cell.
- Development of new compositions and dosage forms with effective delivery vehicles.
The methods of informatics, bioinformatics, genomics and proteomics were extensively investigated for the development
of new antimycotics. These techniques were employed in finding and identification of new molecular proteins in a fungal
cell; in the determination of the selectivity of drug-protein interactions, evaluation of drug-drug interactions and synergism
of drugs; determination of the structure-activity relationship (SAR) studies; determination of the molecular design of the
most active, selective and safer drugs for the humans, animals and plants. In medical applications, the methods of information analysis and pharmacogenomics allows to take into account the individual phenotype of the patient, the level of
expression of the targets of antifungal drugs when choosing antifungal agents and its dosage. This review article incorporates
some of the most significant studies covering the basic structures and approaches for the synthesis of antifungal drugs and
the directions for their further development.
