Teixobactin, I assume? Their new method of parallel testing promising proto-antibiotics is really neat, but given the ratio of successes to failures, I wouldn't hold out much hope for a second golden age.
Possibly irrelevant correlation: This is pattern is also observed in graphics techniques and programming styles.
Yet, the incremental quantitative advances continue to accumulate to become qualitative differences.
While modifications of existing classes of antibiotics are still critically important and useful, the big problem is that "new antibiotics that conform to established classes are often subject to at least some of the same resistances observed in previous members of the class."[0] They help in that they buy time, but development of novel classes of antibiotics is what's necessary to buy more time. And we're going to need a lot of them.[1]
In engineering or any scientific field, incremental progress is clearly still progress. For most other kinds of drugs, time doesn't work against their effectiveness. Texts describe the use of aspirin precursors, such as willow teas, dates back over four thousand years to ancient Sumer. Salicylates haven't stopped being effective since then.
The trouble with antibiotics is that resistance inevitably develops over time even if we manage to curb their misuse. It isn't enough to enough to develop new antibiotics, novel or otherwise; to keep the "miracle of antibiotics" alive, we need to continually to develop novel ones.
haZard_OS|7 years ago
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14098
Note that the paper isn't only about a new antibiotic but also about a promising method for making additional discoveries via uncultured bacteria.
88e282102ae2e5b|7 years ago
ShannonAlther|7 years ago
alpos|7 years ago
Bluestrike2|7 years ago
In engineering or any scientific field, incremental progress is clearly still progress. For most other kinds of drugs, time doesn't work against their effectiveness. Texts describe the use of aspirin precursors, such as willow teas, dates back over four thousand years to ancient Sumer. Salicylates haven't stopped being effective since then.
The trouble with antibiotics is that resistance inevitably develops over time even if we manage to curb their misuse. It isn't enough to enough to develop new antibiotics, novel or otherwise; to keep the "miracle of antibiotics" alive, we need to continually to develop novel ones.
0. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4159373/
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3085877