In case anyone cares, there's a lot of research going on around non-ribosomal peptide synthases and polyketide synthases to begin to manually search the space of natural compounds (along with looking for the magic proteins / products in the wild that make new antibiotics).
It's always awesome to see new forms of antibiotics. If I were a company with the money, I would be stockpiling a good ten or twenty new/unique ways to kill bacteria and holding onto them until most current antibiotics are showing ineffective. Keep them off the market to ensure they don't get the same treatment current ones are. This is a testament to anyone today who thinks we haven't moved forward, or have slowed down in comparison to these "golden ages" of discovery.Had anyone stumbled on teixobactin in the 1950s, back in the golden age of antibiotic discovery, they could have easily spent their career on it.
Well, the funny thing is that most antibiotics are regularly found in the wild, this one was discovered by screening for inhibitors of soil microbes that were produced by other soil microbes. These things have probably been in the wild for centuries, but it's only when they get deployed on a truly massive (human-population-wide) scale that resistance actually reared its head up. I remember a talk in a public health class I took in college showing the rise, fall, and subsequent rise of chemical resistance in the parasitic worms (or maybe the carrier flies) that cause river blindness in Africa. It all correlated pretty well to efforts by NGOs to drug-away the illness (as well as when they gave up when it became ineffective). Resistance might be quick to pop up, but it's sometimes just as quick to go back into hiding. Bugs who expend fitness on antibiotic pumps / mutant cell wall proteins usually get outcompeted by those who don't. Even the most fractional changes in fitness make a different when your division time is 20 minutes and the time scale is a few years. Funny enough, Derek Lowe has criticized genomics people in the past for declaring revolutions in medicine and then wasting billions of pharma dollars when the research failed to actually improve drug discovery. He's a pretty big stickler for "the only thing that can prove a good drug is good trials". Still soil microbe metagenomics is some pretty crazy research that only scratches the tip of the iceberg of all the possible biological information available on the surface of the earth.This is a testament to anyone today who thinks we haven't moved forward, or have slowed down in comparison to these "golden ages" of discovery.
We haven't slowed down, its just that the game has changed. In the past 50-100 years, big ideas got the breakthroughs. Now its not about big ideas anymore, we have plenty of those. Its about big data. We do not have the computational resources (yet) to step up our research. In medical research, there are not "huge" discoveries anymore. Because we are dealing with a much smaller scale and a small discovery here and there doesn't "add up". I see people puzzling around signaling pathways. Its like each group picks one and then rides on it until the end of time. Its time to scale this up, not puzzle one pathway at once, mass research it. We are seeing this approach with genetic sequencing, cancer diagnosis or brain mapping. We generate HUGE amounts of data, without the time and computers to deal with that data. Its not about that guy who thinks hard enough about a problem until he screams EUREKA! and sprints to the lab to do that one experiment that will change the course of biology for the next 50 years. Its about deciphering the masses of data that we are producing and then looking for patterns in them. At least that is what I believe :)This is a testament to anyone today who thinks we haven't moved forward, or have slowed down in comparison to these "golden ages" of discovery.