Author Description

In 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) listed cancer as the second leading cause of death and highlighted antimicrobial resistance as “a key global health challenge” that may, in a worst case scenario, lead to an annual death toll of 10 million by 2050, which would exceed predicted cancer deaths by 20%. Novel promising therapeutic options to reduce morbidity and mortality of both infectious microbial diseases and cancer are being developed based on antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), i.e., evolutionary proven antibiotics that also possess anti-cancer activities. Intriguingly, AMPs and anti-cancer peptides (ACPs) rely typically on novel mechanisms and cellular targets not used by current antibiotics or chemotherapeutics. Initiated by presentations at the International Meeting of Antimicrobial Peptides in 2016 (IMAP 2016), hosted at Leipzig University, Germany, this book compiles the most recent strategies and promising lead compounds for treating multi- and pan-resistant microbes and chemo-resistant cancer cells in fourteen different chapters representing leading research groups from five different continents. In this respect, the book shall stimulate new avenues of thinking and strategies in tackling forthcoming antimicrobial and cancer resistance health threats with the hope that the scenarios recently reported by the WHO will never eventuate.