ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the therapeutic arsenal of antifungal drugs is narrow when compared to that of antibacterial drugs, whose mechanisms of action can be grouped into three cellular sites of action, encompassing several classes of drugs available for clinical use. The echinocandins are the only new class of antifungal drugs to reach clinical use in decades, with three available drugs: caspofungin, micafungin, and anidulafungin. Epidemiological cut-off value allow the surveillance of the susceptibility of a given fungal species to a specific antifungal drug throughout time, enabling a better understanding of the epidemiological behaviour of fungi, especially in the presence of environmental selective pressures. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing of microrganisms has been performed primarily to predict the outcome of antimicrobial therapy in individual patients and to collect local data on antimicrobial susceptibility in order to support the use of empirical therapy.
