Matt Cooper, a medical chemist at the University of Queensland, Australia, puffs out his cheeks and scratches his head. He’s trying to explain why the pipeline for new antibiotics is quite so dry. “The problem,” he says, “is that finding new antibiotics is now really, really hard.”
It’s a worrying concession given how badly we need new drugs. Drug-resistant superbugs already kill hundreds of thousands of people every year and, according to the Antimicrobial Review (AMR) committee chaired by Jim O’Neill, if left unchecked they will kill 10 million of us every year by 2050. That’s more than will be killed by cancer, diarrhoeal disease or road traffic accidents.
A reason behind the exodus of big pharma was that finding new drugs became difficult. Most antibiotics came from compounds made by micro-organisms in the soil. Scientists, like children at the beach, needed only a bucket and a spade to collect soil samples, bring them back to the laboratory to be cultured, and try to identify any compounds that could kill bugs. “We were finding 12 antibiotics a year. Nobody worried much about resistance or overuse because we thought there would always be more.”
Scientists have since scoured ocean beds and deep caves for micro-organisms that make new compounds but had come up empty-handed – until, that is, earlier this year when a team from Northeastern University in Boston, U.S., announced they had discovered 25 potential new compounds in the soil. One of them, teixobactin, showed promise in laboratory tests against otherwise drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis and the hospital superbug MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus).
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: Resistance isn’t futile – how to tackle drug-resistant superbugs
