In vitro potency of combinatorial antifungal drugs towards Candida isolates from patients

Abstract

AbstractCandidiasis is a fungal infection (mycosis) caused by an opportunistic yeast with only 8-10 pathogenic species. In spite of the multiple classes of antifungal drugs available to combat these infections, the treatment is hampered by drug toxicity, tolerability, emergence of drug resistant isolates and many more. Combination therapy has been suggested as a possible approach to improve these treatment outcomes. This study is, therefore, aimed at the analysis of the sensitivity of Candida isolates obtained from patients towards different classes of drugs affecting multiple pathways in the pathogen life cycle. Four different individual drugs with different mechanisms of action and six different combinations of these drugs at three different proportions (1:1, 1:3, and 3:1) were used for the study. All the drug sensitivity assays were performed by the agar well diffusion method. The results were statistically analyzed using Prism software. Results have shown synergistic effects of drug combinations on the sensitivity of the isolates without much variation in the stoichiometric ratios, thereby providing an alternative to monotherapy to combat the emergence of drug resistant isolates and drying existing drug pipelines.