Similarity searching for anticandidal agents employing a repurposing approach

Fungal infections caused by <i>Candida</i> are still a public health concern. Particularly, the resistance to traditional chemotherapeutic agents is a major issue that requires efforts to develop new therapies. One of the most interesting approaches to finding new active compounds is drug repurposing aided by computational methods. In this work, two databases containing anticandidal agents and drugs were studied employing cheminformatics and compared by similarity methods. The results showed 36 drugs with high similarities to some candicidals. From these drugs, trimetozin, osalmid and metochalcone were evaluated against <i>C. albicans</i> (18804), <i>C. glabrata</i> (90030), and miconazole-resistant strain <i>C. glabrata</i> (32554). Osalmid and metochalcone were the best, with activity in the micromolar range. These findings represent an opportunity to continue with the research on the potential antifungal application of osalmid and metochalcone as well as the design of structurally related derivatives.