World on cusp of 'post-antibiotic era'

Re:World on cusp of 'post-antibiotic era' by refurb on Thursday November 19, 2015 @11:38AM (#10595717)

Only two truly new (new mechanism of action) antibiotics have been developed in the last 30-40 years. A number of new antibiotics were approved in the 80's and 90's, but I wouldn't say people thought we had won the war.

The really challenging thing with antibiotics (as a reply below notes) is that if you create a great new antibiotic, nobody will use it unless they have to.

There is resistance out there, but for most infections, the 40+ year old antibiotics work just fine. It's not like almost every other disease where the best drug gets used first line.

Unless the financial incentives are fixed, it's unlikely there will be enough incentive to do the R&D to create new antibiotics.

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Re:World on cusp of 'post-antibiotic era' by kbenson on Thursday November 19, 2015 @12:41PM (#10596154)

There was an interesting radiolab episode recently[1] about this. The information in this discussion is somewhat contradictory to it, but it paints both an interesting history of antibiotics, and has an interesting story about the possible future.

1: http://www.radiolab.org/story/best-medicine/

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Re:World on cusp of 'post-antibiotic era' by brianclements on Thursday November 19, 2015 @02:41PM (#10597023)

I really enjoyed this episode (as I do all the episodes really).

The key information they presented was that just because bacteria evolve quickly to modern forms of antibiotics, doesn't mean they don't also reduce to their tolerance to older (in this case, 1000 years older) antibiotic-like medicines that we would dismiss outright because it wasn't created in the modern age. Old medicine was very much trial and error, but it doesn't mean it can't also be effective or worth looking into deeper for ideas.

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