Antibiotic Resistance and Drug Discovery

Antibiotic resistance is a topic we discuss in my class.  With our current textbook, we mostly talk about ciprofloxacin and Campylobacter resistance, but there are many, many more examples, including drug-resistant strains of Pseudomonas, Mycobacterium, Staphylococcus, and lots more. 
Most people aren’t aware that the problem of antibiotic resistance isn’t new.  Penicillin began to be used fairly widely by 1943, and the first documented cases of penicillin-resistant bacteria occurred just two years later.  In fact, this seems to be a relatively normal pattern: most of the antibiotics that we commonly think of have finite effective periods.  When these run out, we have to find new antibiotics to treat infections. This isn’t some magic process, and new antibiotics are surprisingly not all that easy to come by. 
This video shows a little bit about how new drugs can be discovered and why we don’t have more drugs.

One of the things in this video that I particularly liked is that it emphasizes that antibiotics are natural products.  They come from other bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms–this is a way to reduce or eliminate competition!  Because these compounds exist in nature, that means that so do antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.  They’re not an exclusively human invention.  We exacerbate the problem, but we didn’t create it.

Plus, I love Ph.D. Comics.com!

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