Progress of Photoantibiotics in Overcoming Antibiotic Resistance

Abstract

Antibiotic resistance has emerged as a global public health crisis in the 21st century, leading to treatment failures. To address this issue, the medical and pharmaceutical sectors are confronted with two challenges: i) finding potent new antimicrobial agents that would work against resistant–pathogens, and ii) developing conceptually new or unconventional strategies by which a particular antibiotic would remain effective persistently. Photopharmacology with the aid of reversibly controllable light‐active antibiotics that we call “photoantibiotics” shows great promise to meet the second challenge, which has inspired numerous research laboratories worldwide to align their research in inventing or developing such antibiotics. In this review, we have given an overview of the progress made over the last ten years or so towards developing such photoantibiotics. Although making such antibiotics that hold high antimicrobial potency like the native drugs and subsequently maintain a significant activity difference between light irradiated and non‐irradiated states is very challenging, the progress being reported here demonstrates the feasibility of various approaches to engineer photoantibiotics. This review provides a future perspective on the use of such antibiotics in clinical practice with the identification of potential problems and their solutions.