It feels like I've read this same introduction for the last 30 years. I mean, I remember reading stuff like this around 1992 in the Sean Connery film "Medicine Man", with Connery's character searching the Amazon for a anti-cancer drug.
> One hope was that the next antibiotic breakthrough would emerge from making and testing enough of these synthetic compounds. But that effort has fallen flat: Though other medicines have been developed in the lab, no new registered classes of antibiotics have been discovered since the 1980s.
Doesn't that also speak to a failure of natural products research, which has also been trying to find "the next antibiotic breakthrough"?
"Antibiotic resistance: 'Snot wars' study yields new class of drugs" - "A new class of antibiotics has been discovered by analysing the bacterial warfare taking place up people's noses, scientists report." - 5 years ago, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12180966 . About lugdunin. Doesn't seem to have gone anywhere.
"New class of antibiotics discovered by chemists " from 7 years ago, about oxadiazoles. Found by computer search. Doesn't seem to have gone anywhere.
"First pictures of enzyme that drives new class of antibiotics" from 2 years ago, about obafluorin, "made by a fluorescent strain of soil bacteria that forms biofilms on plant roots". Wikipedia doesn't know about it.
And if I do a DDG search for "new antibiotic class", I find:
"Murepavadin: a new antibiotic class in the pipeline" (2018) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29451043/ . Wikipedia describes it as "the first example of an outer membrane protein-targeting antibiotic class with a novel, nonlytic mechanism of action".
"A new antibiotic kills pathogens without detectable resistance" (2015) https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14098 . Teixobactin. Wikipedia describes it as "a peptide-like secondary metabolite of some species of bacteria, that kills some gram-positive bacteria. It appears to belong to a new class of antibiotics, and harms bacteria by binding to lipid II and lipid III ... discovered using a new method of culturing bacteria in soil, which allowed researchers to grow a previously unculturable bacterium now named Eleftheria terrae, which produces the antibiotic."
That's at least 5 new natural product leads on a new class of antibiotics, yet none made the list.
> the focus on nature waned as scientists instead built large chemical libraries filled with tens of thousands of lab-made molecules
If natural product search doesn't work, and lab-made molecules don't work, then ... is it really right to focus only on the failure of the latter?
- The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature
- Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Future
- Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime