Barriers on the Road to New Antibiotics

Antibiotics have been around since the introduction of penicillin in the 1940s, but the fight against bacterial infections is far from over. The emergence of resistant strains or "superbugs" has made bacterial infections increasingly difficult to treat with available antibiotics. Staphylococcus aureus is one of the most challenging; it is responsible for half of hospital-associated infections and claims the lives of about 100,000 patients each year in the United States alone.¹

Antibiotic-resistant S. aureus strains have increased at an alarming pace of about 8% each year in the last decade. Resistance is rising to even the most powerful drugs, such as vancomycin, and seems to appear within a decade of an antibiotic's launch into the market.²³

Currently, all the infection-fighting drugs on the market or in company pipelines are in the traditional antibiotic model. Modern genomic technologies have, so far, failed to deliver novel therapeutics, with only two new classes ...