NURS 3550H Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Chemotherapy, Microorganism, Organism
28 Dec 2018
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Selective toxicity: the ability of a drug to injure a target cell or target organism without injuring other cells or organisms that are in intimate contact with the target. In antimicrobial drugs, selective toxicity indicates the ability of an antibiotic to kill or suppress microbial pathogens without causing injury to the host. Selective toxicity is the property that makes antibiotics valuable. If antibiotics were as harmful to the host as they are to infecting organisms-these drugs would have no therapeutic utility. Selective toxicity is achieved by the differences in the cellular chemistry of mammals and microbes. Disruption of bacterial protein synthesis: bacterial and mammalian cells: protein synthesis done by ribosomes, bacterial and mammalian ribosomes are not identical, so we can make drugs that disrupt function of one but not the other. Antibiotics differ in antimicrobial activity, some are narrow-spectrum or broad spectrum. Table 83-1: classification of antimicrobial drugs by susceptible organisms.
