Most importantly, the use of novel antibiotics must be strictly prohibited in the animal food industry.
This is crucial because the misuse of antibiotics in livestock farming has been a major driver of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), a global health crisis. When antibiotics are overused or improperly applied in animals, bacteria can evolve to become resistant, rendering these life-saving drugs ineffective for treating infections in humans and animals alike.
It has always been a perversity that life-saving reserve antibiotics were ever permitted to prop up the grotesque machinery of the modern food industry—a system built on global-scale animal cruelty.
Though I believe that still pales in comparison to US agricultural use. Based on some rough data sources I think the US uses about 2-3x more antibiotics on livestock than India uses on people.
Unfortunately, in terms of antifungals both the EU and US are still using tons of them in the context of agriculture [1] which is contributing to drug resistance of human pathogenic fungi [2].
The references below focus on Aspergillus, but there are many such example in other fungal pathogens.
[2] Celia-Sanchez BN, Mangum B, Gómez Londoño LF, Wang C, Shuman B, Brewer MT, Momany M. Pan-azole- and multi-fungicide-resistant Aspergillus fumigatus is widespread in the United States. Appl Environ Microbiol. 2024 Apr 17;90(4):e0178223. doi: 10.1128/aem.01782-23. Epub 2024 Apr 1. PMID: 38557086; PMCID: PMC11022549.
In most EU countries it is very hard to reach a doctor in decent time unless you can afford to pay a lot.
So you can suffer for weeks with an infection and high fever because the pharmacies won't sell you antibiotics because you don't have a paper from a doctor.
Meat agriculture, as practiced in most of the world on an industrial basis with insufficient regulation, leads to pandemics, evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, climate change, and air, water, and soil pollution.
Regarding this detail, there has been only one pandemic recently and it has not been attributed to 'meat agriculture', though it may have involved wild meat.
Completely agree. Reducing or getting rid of livestock animal agriculture will help with many major challenges we have today, like climate change, loss of biodiversity, animal cruelty, antimicrobial resistance. But hey, gotta have that cheap burger, huh?
We, the people, have the power to improve this situation. Call your representatives, do activism, talk to your friends about it, vote for the right candidates.
> We, the people, have the power to improve this situation. Call your representatives, do activism, talk to your friends about it, vote for the right candidates.
And stop eating meat and fish! It's insane for many reasons even if you don't care about how the animals are treated:
* Biodiversity loss: because we kill everything in the sea by fishing, and we kill everything in the fields for intensive agriculture (which is needed to feed the cattle). And because of deforestation of course.
* Antibiotic-resistance: because putting so many animals (fishes or cows) together brings diseases we need to treat.
* CO2 emissions: it's super inefficient, we all know it.
Not being a vegetarian in 2025 is just completely unreasonable.
We had Greta Thunberg talking to politicians, but actually I'm looking forward to when kids will ask their parents: "So you know you are killing us in so many ways, and you can't be arsed to eat less meat? Aren't you supposed to care about us?"
Ehh, I don't think the problem is so much that we eat meat, it is how we produce it. Beef for example is raised primarily with alfalfa, a legume that puts nitrogen in the soil for free rather than having to turn fossil fuels into nitrogen fertilizer or spending substantial fractions of the total world's electricity generation on its production. Plus the fertilizer from the cow shit itself. Its not like we are short on land capable of growing grass, farmland utilization has been dropping for decades, a lot of those places get regular rainfall and alfalfa is nearly free to grow and harvest.
Of course getting people to learn about these things and politicians to adopt sensible policies about it is a whole other game.
Top-tier antibiotics need to be reserved for humans. Absolutely. Obviously, overuse of any antibiotics in huge populations of humans or animals leads to bacteria evolving resistance... for a random event in a trillion, it ends up being a pretty determinstic fact, just like neutron decay.
It doesn't necessarily follow that using 2nd or 3rd tier antibiotics in limited cases in animal populations is always unwarranted, so long as we're aware of the potential for resistance and we're developing new ways to counter it. You have to play the cards you're dealt. Yes, the elimination of mass meat farming would go a long way toward preventing the adaptation of novel resistant bacteria. The situation, though, is that this type of farming will continue to happen for a long time. Regulations should prohibit the overuse of antibiotics, without completely preventing their use.
"New antibiotic that kills drug-resistant bacteria" until we freely give the recipe to developing country pharmaceutical companies with no requirement to control distribution so now this antibiotic is given for a simple cough and we're back where we started.
Antibiotic resistance is as much a political problem as a biology one.
Developing countries should absolutely get the standard set of antibiotics.
Formulas for "antibiotics of last resort" (I would consider a newly designed one in this category) should not be sent to Pharma companies of these countries, rather, the antibiotics should be pre-dosed and mailed over from a country who can maintain the integrity of the formula in a limited fashion to keep their effectiveness high so they can continue to serve patients years into the future.
It sucks, but we've watched antibiotics be abused so badly that babies are born into hospitals where they catch resistant infections nearly right after childbirth. I blame the antibiotics-for-every-cough medical practices common in some countries (I've seen this happen myself!)
Naive question here: Why can't new antibiotics be developed by just spraying fields of mushrooms or petri dishes full of fungi with antibiotic resistant bacteria and seeing which ones come up with novel ways to fight them?
Can't answer this particular question. But I remember hearing that developing new antibiotics is not very profitable - To minimize resistance building against new antibiotics, old antibiotics will be used until they are no longer working. So new antibiotics just won't sell that much for now.
About 1/8 of global deaths are due to some sort of bacterial infection, pretty close behind cancer ( 1/6 ).
However for children the number that die of infection in the UK is double that of cancer deaths - ( ~15% versus ~7% ) - and that's in an advanced economy.
Infection is a big problem.
In terms of barriers to making treatments - yes in part there is a problem with the right financial incentives - but it's not the only problem - finding molecules that simultaneously kill bacteria, won't be rapidly evolved around, and are safe to take isn't that easy. Then you have the problem of selectivity between bacteria - how many different sorts will it work with - 'good' verus 'bad' bacteria etc. Then you have the problem of being able to make the molecule at scale etc.
The good news is there is a constant bacteria on bacteria, fungus on bacteria chemical war going on - hence the paper.
It’s because antibiotic resistance is a misunderstood issue. If one antibiotic doesn’t work, you move on to the next. Maintaining antibiotic resistance is energetically costly to the bacteria. If you aren’t actively selecting with that antibiotic, its resistance will be lost before long as mutants with deficient antibiotic resistance are now more fit and outcompete those with functional antibiotic resistance.
Same goes for chemo therapy. There are many chemo therapies from 60s still being used due to the fact their patent is still owned by certain oligarchy.
Bacteriophages suck. What some people never tell you is that the body treats phages as invaders and can very effectively get rid of them, they are not adapted to the human environment. These are only good for local treatments, sometimes...
To expand on what you wrote, the challenge with phages is that they’re highly specific to certain bacteria, in the same way that some viruses target gorillas and some target humans. We have yet to find broad spectrum phages. While humans have been saved from bacteria by phages, it requires identifying the bacteria strain, looking up appropriate phage that can target that bacteria, cultivating a dose of the phage, etc. So, yea, phages are highly effective, but there are practical challenges. As you say, antibiotics are lazy.
Ok, another naive question: Not suggesting we just eat a bunch of bacteriophages, but why wouldn't studying phage mechanisms / proteins for killing bacteria be equally useful?
It's a fantastic show, but I am not sure it touches on the commenter's point at all. The show is a take on what might happen if a panacea was actually found to exist. That's a bit different than a mere novel antibiotic. I even think the writers are pulling a lot of punch with how violent and insane Big Pharm, Governments and even independent groups would get about control over it.
Still, highly recommend people watch it. Great animation and art style, good writing and characterization, music is pretty rad and it's quite the trip at times.
What makes you think there exists a way to fight that isn't harmful the host. Antibiotics work by stopping some biologicial pathway - there are only so many of those in bacteria, you can stop them at any point of course, but you have to stop it. However most of those pathways are also in other lifeforms and so stopping the pathway means you kill not only the bacteria but also human/mushroom.
We have been lucky that we have found a few pathways that are not in human (read mammals) that are in bacteria we worry about. However bacteria just finds a different pathway and odds are that is a pathway in humans and so we can't use it because it would kill humans as well.
Or try an evolutionary approach. Artificially enforce some dependency between an organisms' (fungi, bacteria) ability to kill a wide spectrum of targets, and their own continued survival. Let the organism spread on a large matrix in close contact with the targets and zap the areas where the targets are thriving; repeat until you have evolved strains that are effective in destroying the targets. Wonder if it's possible or even been tried.
Producing large quantities of drug resistant bacteria sounds at least BSL3. The principle might make sense, but one wouldn’t “spray the fields” of something like that.
I'm absolutely not educated in the world of antibiotics, but i can imagine it might be very difficult to monitor this kind of complex behaviour in a (hopefuly) very secured controlled environment.
It's much easier if you invest in observing the natural world that has had hundreds of millions of years to do the work, without the limitation of human intention.
The Amazon rainforest has evolved for at least 55 million years. It is
likely home to millions of compounds of potential medicinal value. In
just 50 years 100 million hectares, 390 billion individual trees
16,000 visible species and (estimated unknown) >100,000 types of
non-visible fungi, bacterium, microbes etc, have been destroyed. It's
why I found this wide-eyed statement in TFA particularly cringe:
The discovery shows that "there is terrifically interesting stuff
hiding in plain sight".
The main problem with development of new antibiotics is not that it requires groundbreaking new science to be invented, but that there is no business case for it. Or at least the business case for spending your R&D on anti-obesity medicine looks a lot better.
So, for those of us down here at the bottom of the karma ladder, after 5000 lines of comments about giving antibiotics to cows, which had nothing to do with the article, there is some actual discussion of the topic.
This inability to bring a product to market is in fact an artifact of the for-profit healthcare system.
Besides the obvious aspects of weight-loss and erectile-dysfunction drugs being more profitable, there is also an issue with imaginary property.
Pharma will not bring a drug to market unless they can own exclusive rights. Since this is a naturally occurring molecule, some tweak will need to be made before the chemical is eligible for a patent.
So until some company can make a custom modification, without disrupting the efficacy, it won't be considered a viable product.
> This inability to bring a product to market is in fact an artifact of the for-profit healthcare system.
If that were the only, or principal, problem then surely we would notice that single payer systems do better by demanding production of other therapies.
Yeah, someone else mentioned that as well; if the researched, mass produced and readily available antibiotic is still mostly effective and sells well, spending millions on finding and getting approval for one that would only be used in 1% of cases is not profitable.
> The ribosome is an attractive antibiotic target because bacteria don’t easily develop resistance to drugs targeting the structure, adds Lewis.
Sure they do, by the general mechanism of preventing the drug from entering the bacterium and/or pumping it back out. Bacteria have general mechanisms for removing molecules they don't need.
This molecule is a peptide, so one mechanism for developing resistance would be evolution of a specific protease. Bacteria already have enzymes for breaking peptide bonds.
It's interesting that this antibacterial molecule is created by a bacteria. So there's one bacteria that's resistant I guess. But maybe that's not a concerning type of bacteria but I hear that bacteria can transfer traits from one species to another...
Oh it's completely expected that bacteria create antibiotics - it's part of the low-level chemical warfare that bacteria carry out against each other. Plants as well are chemical factories ('secondary metabolism') that produce all sorts of crazy compounds to kill each other off, as well as insects.
Not quite. Alexander Fleming was growing cultures of staph bacteria, went away for some time, and when he came back, found one petri dish had been contaminated with fungus, and that the fungus inhibited the growth of the bacteria. It seems to be unclear where the contamination came from, but the fungus itself was already known to science at the time.
The cantaloupe is how the US production process in vats got a massive efficiency kick because the mould on the cantaloupe released significantly more penicillin than the prior one. But, this was after the initial discovery.
It's in "Florey: The Man Who Made Penicillin" by Lennard Bickel
"Researchers have discovered a new antibiotic molecule that targets a broad range of disease-causing bacteria — even strains resistant to commercial drugs — and is not toxic to human cells. [1]"
Most importantly, the use of novel antibiotics must be strictly prohibited in the animal food industry.
This is crucial because the misuse of antibiotics in livestock farming has been a major driver of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), a global health crisis. When antibiotics are overused or improperly applied in animals, bacteria can evolve to become resistant, rendering these life-saving drugs ineffective for treating infections in humans and animals alike.
It has always been a perversity that life-saving reserve antibiotics were ever permitted to prop up the grotesque machinery of the modern food industry—a system built on global-scale animal cruelty.
Yeah, like if the current US situation would tend towards food industry safety ...
Mmm why US specifically? The most overuse of livestock antibiotics is in India (and India has a lot of drug factories).
In general I would agree, but with RFK in charge of that stuff I hope he is able to enact some change
The people have the power. Why not millions of people are on the fucking streets every day across the US is beyond me.
Meanwhile doctors in India hand antibiotics out like candy.
Though I believe that still pales in comparison to US agricultural use. Based on some rough data sources I think the US uses about 2-3x more antibiotics on livestock than India uses on people.
Antibiotics are much cheaper there. They even prescribe it as a preventive measure.
and those indian made antibiotics sometimes are little different in effectiveness than candy
I dread it when any generic medication I get is made in india or china since the fda doesn't meaningfully regulate/test their stuff
Routine use of antibiotics is already prohibited in EU and most developed countries.
Unfortunately, in terms of antifungals both the EU and US are still using tons of them in the context of agriculture [1] which is contributing to drug resistance of human pathogenic fungi [2].
The references below focus on Aspergillus, but there are many such example in other fungal pathogens.
[1] Impact of the use of azole fungicides, other than as human medicines, on the development of azole‐resistant Aspergillus spp. https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/9200
[2] Celia-Sanchez BN, Mangum B, Gómez Londoño LF, Wang C, Shuman B, Brewer MT, Momany M. Pan-azole- and multi-fungicide-resistant Aspergillus fumigatus is widespread in the United States. Appl Environ Microbiol. 2024 Apr 17;90(4):e0178223. doi: 10.1128/aem.01782-23. Epub 2024 Apr 1. PMID: 38557086; PMCID: PMC11022549.
How routine is routine ? I'm sure the agro industry will have a very broad interpretation of that...
The US is a lot of space and India is a lot of people and animals. More than twice the land and around three times the population of Europe.
In most EU countries it is very hard to reach a doctor in decent time unless you can afford to pay a lot.
So you can suffer for weeks with an infection and high fever because the pharmacies won't sell you antibiotics because you don't have a paper from a doctor.
If we have enough drugs with different mechanics bacteria can’t out evolve all of them. It becomes less of a risk.
Sure they can, by being exposed one at a time, developing resistance to each.
That's like saying we just need more nukes to deter other people with nukes from nuking us.
Routine antibiotic use in livestock has been banned in the US for a few years.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/12/health/fda-to-phase-out-u...
Meat agriculture, as practiced in most of the world on an industrial basis with insufficient regulation, leads to pandemics, evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, climate change, and air, water, and soil pollution.
> leads to pandemics
Regarding this detail, there has been only one pandemic recently and it has not been attributed to 'meat agriculture', though it may have involved wild meat.
Completely agree. Reducing or getting rid of livestock animal agriculture will help with many major challenges we have today, like climate change, loss of biodiversity, animal cruelty, antimicrobial resistance. But hey, gotta have that cheap burger, huh?
We, the people, have the power to improve this situation. Call your representatives, do activism, talk to your friends about it, vote for the right candidates.
> We, the people, have the power to improve this situation. Call your representatives, do activism, talk to your friends about it, vote for the right candidates.
And stop eating meat and fish! It's insane for many reasons even if you don't care about how the animals are treated:
* Biodiversity loss: because we kill everything in the sea by fishing, and we kill everything in the fields for intensive agriculture (which is needed to feed the cattle). And because of deforestation of course. * Antibiotic-resistance: because putting so many animals (fishes or cows) together brings diseases we need to treat. * CO2 emissions: it's super inefficient, we all know it.
Not being a vegetarian in 2025 is just completely unreasonable.
We had Greta Thunberg talking to politicians, but actually I'm looking forward to when kids will ask their parents: "So you know you are killing us in so many ways, and you can't be arsed to eat less meat? Aren't you supposed to care about us?"
I'm fine with the burger being expensive, just want the burger.
Ehh, I don't think the problem is so much that we eat meat, it is how we produce it. Beef for example is raised primarily with alfalfa, a legume that puts nitrogen in the soil for free rather than having to turn fossil fuels into nitrogen fertilizer or spending substantial fractions of the total world's electricity generation on its production. Plus the fertilizer from the cow shit itself. Its not like we are short on land capable of growing grass, farmland utilization has been dropping for decades, a lot of those places get regular rainfall and alfalfa is nearly free to grow and harvest.
Of course getting people to learn about these things and politicians to adopt sensible policies about it is a whole other game.
we the people don't want change.
[flagged]
[dead]
> This is crucial because the misuse of antibiotics in livestock farming has been a major driver of antimicrobial resistance
Who cares ? As long as we have cheap eggs and burger patties!!!
Top-tier antibiotics need to be reserved for humans. Absolutely. Obviously, overuse of any antibiotics in huge populations of humans or animals leads to bacteria evolving resistance... for a random event in a trillion, it ends up being a pretty determinstic fact, just like neutron decay.
It doesn't necessarily follow that using 2nd or 3rd tier antibiotics in limited cases in animal populations is always unwarranted, so long as we're aware of the potential for resistance and we're developing new ways to counter it. You have to play the cards you're dealt. Yes, the elimination of mass meat farming would go a long way toward preventing the adaptation of novel resistant bacteria. The situation, though, is that this type of farming will continue to happen for a long time. Regulations should prohibit the overuse of antibiotics, without completely preventing their use.
In the 1960s a Canadian research expedition collected soil samples from Easter Island which led to the discovery of rapamycin (aka sirolimus).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirolimus
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9634974/
(Full disclosure - spent my PhD working with macrolides including this one. It's an amazing origin story for a compound...)
The discovery of rapamycin is such a fascinating story. Radiolab covered this a few years back - I encourage everyone to give it a listen: https://radiolab.org/podcast/dirty-drug-and-ice-cream-tub
I would like to be able to listen to this but its almost like it's for 4 year olds.
The scientists looked in the soil samples
"Waaaaa why would you look in soil?? EWW!"
Anyway the compound stopped the fungus growing
"So it's sort of like it stopped time??"
Yes and it had a suppresive effect on the immune system
"So it's sort of like Elsa from Frozen it just freezes things??"
Yes, these are direct quotes from the episode, all within the first few minutes.
"New antibiotic that kills drug-resistant bacteria" until we freely give the recipe to developing country pharmaceutical companies with no requirement to control distribution so now this antibiotic is given for a simple cough and we're back where we started.
Antibiotic resistance is as much a political problem as a biology one.
Developing countries should be deprived of antibiotics, or affordable antibiotics? cui bono? That's too convenient for big pharma companies.
Developing countries should absolutely get the standard set of antibiotics.
Formulas for "antibiotics of last resort" (I would consider a newly designed one in this category) should not be sent to Pharma companies of these countries, rather, the antibiotics should be pre-dosed and mailed over from a country who can maintain the integrity of the formula in a limited fashion to keep their effectiveness high so they can continue to serve patients years into the future.
It sucks, but we've watched antibiotics be abused so badly that babies are born into hospitals where they catch resistant infections nearly right after childbirth. I blame the antibiotics-for-every-cough medical practices common in some countries (I've seen this happen myself!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofbtepraOX4
Naive question here: Why can't new antibiotics be developed by just spraying fields of mushrooms or petri dishes full of fungi with antibiotic resistant bacteria and seeing which ones come up with novel ways to fight them?
Can't answer this particular question. But I remember hearing that developing new antibiotics is not very profitable - To minimize resistance building against new antibiotics, old antibiotics will be used until they are no longer working. So new antibiotics just won't sell that much for now.
About 1/8 of global deaths are due to some sort of bacterial infection, pretty close behind cancer ( 1/6 ).
However for children the number that die of infection in the UK is double that of cancer deaths - ( ~15% versus ~7% ) - and that's in an advanced economy.
Infection is a big problem.
In terms of barriers to making treatments - yes in part there is a problem with the right financial incentives - but it's not the only problem - finding molecules that simultaneously kill bacteria, won't be rapidly evolved around, and are safe to take isn't that easy. Then you have the problem of selectivity between bacteria - how many different sorts will it work with - 'good' verus 'bad' bacteria etc. Then you have the problem of being able to make the molecule at scale etc.
The good news is there is a constant bacteria on bacteria, fungus on bacteria chemical war going on - hence the paper.
It’s because antibiotic resistance is a misunderstood issue. If one antibiotic doesn’t work, you move on to the next. Maintaining antibiotic resistance is energetically costly to the bacteria. If you aren’t actively selecting with that antibiotic, its resistance will be lost before long as mutants with deficient antibiotic resistance are now more fit and outcompete those with functional antibiotic resistance.
Same goes for chemo therapy. There are many chemo therapies from 60s still being used due to the fact their patent is still owned by certain oligarchy.
>{x} is not very profitable
This sums up most of the problems with the late stage capitalism system we are forced to live in.
Because you'll end up finding bacteriophages and wonder why we're wasting so many lives and much money on antibiotics.
Antibiotics are lazy. Sure, some people have to die, but at least you didn't have to spend any time taking samples of the actual infection.
Bacteriophages suck. What some people never tell you is that the body treats phages as invaders and can very effectively get rid of them, they are not adapted to the human environment. These are only good for local treatments, sometimes...
To expand on what you wrote, the challenge with phages is that they’re highly specific to certain bacteria, in the same way that some viruses target gorillas and some target humans. We have yet to find broad spectrum phages. While humans have been saved from bacteria by phages, it requires identifying the bacteria strain, looking up appropriate phage that can target that bacteria, cultivating a dose of the phage, etc. So, yea, phages are highly effective, but there are practical challenges. As you say, antibiotics are lazy.
Ok, another naive question: Not suggesting we just eat a bunch of bacteriophages, but why wouldn't studying phage mechanisms / proteins for killing bacteria be equally useful?
The problem is, phages are recognized by your immune system too. They're effectively single-shot, last ditch efforts.
Thank you so much for volunteering!
May I suggest you to watch "Common Side Effects" - an very good animated series loosely based on your premises?
It's a fantastic show, but I am not sure it touches on the commenter's point at all. The show is a take on what might happen if a panacea was actually found to exist. That's a bit different than a mere novel antibiotic. I even think the writers are pulling a lot of punch with how violent and insane Big Pharm, Governments and even independent groups would get about control over it.
Still, highly recommend people watch it. Great animation and art style, good writing and characterization, music is pretty rad and it's quite the trip at times.
What makes you think there exists a way to fight that isn't harmful the host. Antibiotics work by stopping some biologicial pathway - there are only so many of those in bacteria, you can stop them at any point of course, but you have to stop it. However most of those pathways are also in other lifeforms and so stopping the pathway means you kill not only the bacteria but also human/mushroom.
We have been lucky that we have found a few pathways that are not in human (read mammals) that are in bacteria we worry about. However bacteria just finds a different pathway and odds are that is a pathway in humans and so we can't use it because it would kill humans as well.
Or try an evolutionary approach. Artificially enforce some dependency between an organisms' (fungi, bacteria) ability to kill a wide spectrum of targets, and their own continued survival. Let the organism spread on a large matrix in close contact with the targets and zap the areas where the targets are thriving; repeat until you have evolved strains that are effective in destroying the targets. Wonder if it's possible or even been tried.
I believe there's a group [1] at the MIT Media Lab doing this. Certainly others.
[1] https://www.media.mit.edu/groups/sculpting-evolution/overvie...
Producing large quantities of drug resistant bacteria sounds at least BSL3. The principle might make sense, but one wouldn’t “spray the fields” of something like that.
I'm absolutely not educated in the world of antibiotics, but i can imagine it might be very difficult to monitor this kind of complex behaviour in a (hopefuly) very secured controlled environment.
It's much easier if you invest in observing the natural world that has had hundreds of millions of years to do the work, without the limitation of human intention.
The Amazon rainforest has evolved for at least 55 million years. It is likely home to millions of compounds of potential medicinal value. In just 50 years 100 million hectares, 390 billion individual trees 16,000 visible species and (estimated unknown) >100,000 types of non-visible fungi, bacterium, microbes etc, have been destroyed. It's why I found this wide-eyed statement in TFA particularly cringe:
Birds, mostly
There's some interesting history around scientists collecting soil samples from across the world to look for novel antibiotics.
I learned about it through this video, but there's a lot to explore beyond this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ig6ktJGTWk
The road from finding a new molecule with antibiotic properties to passing Phase 3 is... long, arduous and not worth it.
And if you do spend the $1bn to get there, you end up like Achaogen. For anyone in this field, read this teardown of Achaogen: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-03452-0
https://archive.is/5OyBO
The main problem with development of new antibiotics is not that it requires groundbreaking new science to be invented, but that there is no business case for it. Or at least the business case for spending your R&D on anti-obesity medicine looks a lot better.
So, for those of us down here at the bottom of the karma ladder, after 5000 lines of comments about giving antibiotics to cows, which had nothing to do with the article, there is some actual discussion of the topic.
This inability to bring a product to market is in fact an artifact of the for-profit healthcare system.
Besides the obvious aspects of weight-loss and erectile-dysfunction drugs being more profitable, there is also an issue with imaginary property.
Pharma will not bring a drug to market unless they can own exclusive rights. Since this is a naturally occurring molecule, some tweak will need to be made before the chemical is eligible for a patent.
So until some company can make a custom modification, without disrupting the efficacy, it won't be considered a viable product.
> This inability to bring a product to market is in fact an artifact of the for-profit healthcare system.
If that were the only, or principal, problem then surely we would notice that single payer systems do better by demanding production of other therapies.
> The main problem with development of new antibiotics is ... that there is no business case for it.
It sounds like the main problem is a for-profit healthcare system.
Not entirely though. Another problem is that governments only support the big players in drug research. They take the easy simple path.
Yeah, someone else mentioned that as well; if the researched, mass produced and readily available antibiotic is still mostly effective and sells well, spending millions on finding and getting approval for one that would only be used in 1% of cases is not profitable.
Gotta love capitalism.
> The ribosome is an attractive antibiotic target because bacteria don’t easily develop resistance to drugs targeting the structure, adds Lewis.
Sure they do, by the general mechanism of preventing the drug from entering the bacterium and/or pumping it back out. Bacteria have general mechanisms for removing molecules they don't need.
This molecule is a peptide, so one mechanism for developing resistance would be evolution of a specific protease. Bacteria already have enzymes for breaking peptide bonds.
It's interesting that this antibacterial molecule is created by a bacteria. So there's one bacteria that's resistant I guess. But maybe that's not a concerning type of bacteria but I hear that bacteria can transfer traits from one species to another...
Oh it's completely expected that bacteria create antibiotics - it's part of the low-level chemical warfare that bacteria carry out against each other. Plants as well are chemical factories ('secondary metabolism') that produce all sorts of crazy compounds to kill each other off, as well as insects.
Wasn’t this how penicillin was found? On some cantaloupe sent in by an average joe?
Not quite. Alexander Fleming was growing cultures of staph bacteria, went away for some time, and when he came back, found one petri dish had been contaminated with fungus, and that the fungus inhibited the growth of the bacteria. It seems to be unclear where the contamination came from, but the fungus itself was already known to science at the time.
The cantaloupe is how the US production process in vats got a massive efficiency kick because the mould on the cantaloupe released significantly more penicillin than the prior one. But, this was after the initial discovery.
It's in "Florey: The Man Who Made Penicillin" by Lennard Bickel
Love the British humour! Read the bold heading of the first subsection.
So it only kills drug resistant bacteria that came from the technician's garden? That seems unusually specific.
>Enable Javascript and cookies to continue.
That's why I prefer Science Alert and their RSS'.
Weird, I browse with javascript and cookies disabled, and was able to read the article at nature.com.
Not too impressive if it kills bacteria from just one garden.
Amazing this is another new type of antibiotic that was discovered maybe for the last 6 months?
> New antibiotic that kills drug-resistant bacteria
But will it kill humans too?
There's lots of antibiotics out there. Most of them will kill everything, including us, and we don't want them.
People need to learn to actually read articles before writing comments. As the other commenter posted it’s literally answered in the first paragraph.
First paragraph.
"Researchers have discovered a new antibiotic molecule that targets a broad range of disease-causing bacteria — even strains resistant to commercial drugs — and is not toxic to human cells. [1]"
"[1] Jangra, M. et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08723-7 (2025)."