and effects of suloctidil on growth and biofilm formation of the opportunistic fungus .

As the most frequent fungal pathogen in humans, can develop serious drug resistance because its biofilms are resistant to most antifungal agents; this leads to an urgent need to develop novel antifungals. Here, we evaluated the efficacy of an antithrombotic drug, suloctidil, against biofilms and . We found that suloctidil is effective to inhibit biofilm, with a minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of 4 μg/mL, a biofilm inhibiting concentration (BIC) of 16 μg/mL and a biofilm eradicating concentration (BEC) of 64 μg/mL. Furthermore, the concentration-dependent characteristics of suloctidil were shown by its time-kill curves. Scanning electron microscopy images clearly revealed the morphological effects of suloctidil on biofilm. Yeast-to-hyphal form switching is a key virulence factor of ; therefore, we performed hyphal growth tests and observed that suloctidil inhibited yeast-to-hyphal form switching. This result was consistent with the down-regulation of hypha-specific gene (, and ) expression levels after suloctidil treatment. , 256 μg/mL of suloctidil significantly reduced fungal counts (<0.01) compared to that in groups without treatment; the treatment group induced a slight histological reaction, especially when the treatment lasted for 5 days (<0.01). Taken together, our data suggest that suloctidil is a potential antifungal agent.