WE WERE WARNED. The rise of antibiotic resistance is not a surprise.
In 1945, when Sir Alexander Fleming accepted the Nobel Prize for his discovery
of penicillin, he suggested that society should be careful with antibiotics and
that misuse would lead to resistant organisms. He was right, and throughout the
last 70 years, he was not the only one to sound an alarm.
Society is now on the brink of losing the ability to fight dangerous
infections. Bacteria have gained resistance to our arsenal of antibiotics and have
shared their strategies with each other. The once-revered miracle drug penicillin
that revolutionized medicine?a compound made by blue-green mold with the
express purpose of fighting off its enemy bacteria?is now rarely used, and most
of its derivatives are dropping out of commission one by one.
However, while negligent use may fuel resistance, the problem is intensified
by the fact that very few new antibiotics have been approved in the last
few decades. The high cost of research and clinical trials, coupled with the fact
that resistance is a natural phenomenon that will inevitably render new drugs
useless after some period of time, makes their development less profitable. In
fact, many pharmaceutical companies have not researched new antibiotics since
the 1990s.
While many warn of an antibiotic apocalypse, Los Alamos structural
biologist Alex Koglin remains hopeful. His passion for understanding the
structures of proteins and enzymes has led him to a novel approach for
identifying new therapeutics. But that?s not all. Using this technique, he and his
team mined the genomes of thousands of organisms, and earlier this year they
discovered two completely new antibiotics.
Miracle mold...
