Innovations And New Possibilities In The Fight Against Mycobacterium tuberculosis
Tuberculosis. DFT. Molecular Modeling. Resistance. Treatment. Drug Design. Quantum Mechanics
Tuberculosis is a major global health problem, being responsible for the death of 1.2 million people in 2018 alone and the number of infected people grows year after year. The World Health Organization has the Stop Tuberculosis program, whose main objective is to seek alternatives to reduce the incidence of this disease until it is eradicated. For that, constant epidemiological surveillance helps to map new cases and monitor those already diagnosed. Thus, with health agencies of several countries, it was possible to observe the growing appearance of Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains resistant to the widely used treatment schemes, which made the situation even more worrying. This issue was added to the inherent problem in the treatment of tuberculosis, which involves patients' adherence to long-term polychemotherapy, which is often abandoned, allowing the selection and spreading of resistant bacteria. Thus, the development of new antibiotics capable of producing inhibitory effects against M. tuberculosis is of paramount importance in addition to the efforts to control and eliminate tuberculosis, especially in patients with multidrug-resistant strains. In this work, the study of five new molecules with great potential to be inserted in clinical trials was executed aiming at their insertions in treatment regimens, since the study of the biochemical interactions of these molecules with their targets demonstrated satisfactory results in energetic analysis. In addition, this study also demonstrated the support and importance of applying methods based on quantum mechanics to simulate the interactions between drugs and ligands, since it allows understanding the behavior of these bonds and guiding the experiments for the synthesis of new drugs, provided that it enables identifying the importance of each functional group of ligands as well as each amino acid for a successful fixation of a drug in its binding site.