Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs): a patent review (2015–2020)

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Antimicrobial peptides are a large class of compounds that are part of innate immune response found among all classes of life and are considered promising compounds to deal with antimicrobial resistance. These AMPs have been demonstrated to have some advantages over the traditional antibiotics with a broad spectrum of antimicrobial activities and even overcome bacterial drug-resistance.

Areas covered: The present review represents a comprehensive analysis of patents and patent applications available on Espacenet, from the year 2015 to 2020 referring to the therapeutic use of AMPs.

Expert opinion: There are important examples about the use of antimicrobial peptides in clinical practice (e.g. polimixin b, colistin, etc.). AMPs are usually inspired by nature being produced by different living organisms as defensive and/or competition mechanisms. Despite limitations related to their development in classical drug discovery pipeline, they are endowed with relevant advantages, such as an unlimited reservoir of organisms able to produce new AMPs and they represent good starting point upon which to develop new antimicrobials.

KEYWORDS:

• Antimicrobial drugs
• antimicrobial resistance
• antimicrobial peptides
• ESKAPE

Article highlights

• Thanks to several scientific and technological breakthrough new AMPs are discovered and patented

• AMPs contain several structural features that can make them more specific towards different classes of bacteria

• We reported several patents filed to date (2015-2020) that highlights the main trends in the AMPs field

• This analysis could pave the way for further structural modifications and identification of new AMPs

• Despite limitations related to the AMPs development in classical drug discovery pipeline, AMPs are characterized by several advantages such as an unlimited reservoir of organisms able to produce new AMPs that represent a good starting point for the development of new antimicrobial agents.

This box summarizes key points contained in the article.

Declaration of interest

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Reviewer disclosures

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was not funded.