Chemotherapy of Fungal Diseases

Fungal diseases have been with us from antiquity; interest in the chemo­ therapy of fungal disease has exploded in the past decade. To plan and pro­ duce a book on the topic of antifungal chemotherapy has come as a personal challenge - and something of an eye-opener - towards the end of my re­ search career. A landmark publication which still merits reading is Antifungal Chemotherapy (John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, UK), edited by David Speller, which appeared in 1980. However, the fact that ketoconazole, the first of the modern, orally active, wide-spectrum antifungals, attracted no more than two sentences in it indicates just how far we have come in the 1980s. A steady stream of original papers and a number of conference proceedings have chronicled this progress in drug research; outstanding among the latter are the proceedings of an international telesymposium, entitled Recent Trends in the Discovery, Development and Evaluation of Antifungal Agents, edited by Robert Fromtling (J.R. Prous, Barcelona, 1987) and volume 544 of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, entitled Antifungal Drugs, edited by Vassil St. Georgiev, and containing papers and posters presented at a most enjoyable 3-day conference held at Garden City, New York, in the autumn of 1987.