ErythromycinWIKIMEDIA, GIORGIOP2Researchers have devised an approach for synthesizing new macrolide antibiotics from simple chemical building blocks. Using this method, Andrew Myers of Harvard University and colleagues synthesized more than 300 new antibiotic candidates, several of which were effective against some of the most stubbornly drug-resistant bacterial strains, according to the study published today (May 18) in Nature.
“It’s a tour de force in synthetic chemistry,” Kim Lewis of Northeastern University in Boston, who was not involved in the study, told The Scientist. “This is the first time there is a relatively easy path to synthesize macrolide erythromycin-type antibiotics from scratch.”
For most of the field’s history, natural products have been the starting point for new antibiotics. Most of them have been made by chemically modifying natural products in a process known as semisynthesis. Every existing antibiotic in a class called macrolides—including the commonly prescribed drug azithromycin—has been made by modifying erythromycin, which was first discovered in a soil sample in 1949. But some bacteria are developing resistance to these drugs at a startling rate, and semisynthesis is limited by the difficulty of ...
