pyrophosphate

Digging Up New Antibiotics

Posted on January 13th, 2015 by Dr. Francis Collins

Last fall, President Obama issued an Executive Order aimed at combating a growing public health threat: antibiotic-resistant infections that claim the lives of 23,000 Americans every year [1]. So, I’m pleased to report that biomedical research has made some exciting progress on this front with the discovery of what promises to be a powerful new class of antibiotic drugs—the first such discovery in more than 25 years.

There are two significant things about this feat. The first is that the new antibiotic, called teixobactin, not only has the ability to kill a wide range of infection-causing bacteria, but to kill them in a way that may greatly reduce the problem of resistance. The second is that researchers identified teixobactin using an ingenious approach that enhances our ability to search one of nature’s richest sources of potential antibiotics: soil [2, 3].

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