This review is mainly concerned with discussion of antibacterial, antiviral and antifungal activity of sulfated polysaccharides. - GreenMedInfo Summary

At present the increase of antibiotic resistance in infection agents to antimicrobial drugs requires discovery of new antimicrobial substances with improved pharmacological properties and novel mechanisms of action, to which microorganisms do not develop resistance. Three areas are of interest for the search: recovery of new compounds from natural objects, including aquatic organisms, chemical modification of the known antibiotic molecules, discovery of compounds with antimicrobial activity among some new chemical structures which have no analogues in nature. The review is mainly concerned with discussion of antibacterial, antiviral and antifungal activity of sulfated polysaccharides (fucoidans) and extracts of brown, red and green algae, as well as of antioxidant, antiinflammatory, immunomodulatory and antiendotoxin properties that contribute to their antiinfective action. Such an activity makes fucoidans promising as a basis for developing new drugs for therapy of infectious diseases.