A Screening of the MMV Pandemic Response Box Reveals Epetraborole as a New Potent Inhibitor against .

is the one of the most feared bacterial respiratory pathogens in the world. Unfortunately, there are many problems with the current therapies available. These problems include misdiagnoses, high drug resistance, poor long-term treatment outcomes, and high costs. Until now, there have only been a few new compounds or drug formulations which are active against and these are present in preclinical and clinical development only. With that in mind, new and more powerful anti- medicines need to be discovered and developed. In this study, we conducted an in vitro-dual screen against rough (R) and smooth (S) variants using a Pandemic Response Box and identified epetraborole as a new effective candidate for therapy. For further validation, epetraborole showed significant activity against the growth of the wild-type strain, three subspecies, drug-resistant strains and clinical isolates in vitro, while also inhibiting the growth of that reside in macrophages without cytotoxicity. Furthermore, the in vivo efficacy of epetraborole in the zebrafish infection model was greater than that of tigecycline. Thus, we concluded that epetraborole is a potential anti- candidate in the drug search.