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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.

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?

"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.

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...)

Love the British humour! Read the bold heading of the first subsection.

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 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 it only kills drug resistant bacteria that came from the technician's garden? That seems unusually specific.

Not too impressive if it kills bacteria from just one garden.

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...

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

Wasn’t this how penicillin was found? On some cantaloupe sent in by an average joe?

Amazing this is another new type of antibiotic that was discovered maybe for the last 6 months?

> 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.

> 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.

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That's why I prefer Science Alert and their RSS'.