In the heyday
of antibiotic development in the mid-20th century many different chemical compounds with antibacterial properties were examined, but only a small proportion were selected for development into drugs.
The 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath for studies of the protein - manufacturing ribosome, with implications
for antibiotic development.
«There's a huge, unmet clinical need for new approaches against staph skin infections because of
declining antibiotic development and rising drug resistance,» says Lloyd Miller, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of dermatology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Duke University School of Medicine Provenance Laboratory for Auditable Regulatory Science (POLARIS):
auditable antibiotic development with the clinical trials transformation initiative
He authored «Rising Plague», which he wrote to inform and educate the public about the crisis in antibiotic resistant infections and lack
of antibiotic development.
The findings, announced online in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy and funded by the National Institutes of Health, provide a needed boost to the field of
antibiotic development, which has been limited in the last four decades and outpaced by the rise of drug - resistant bacterial strains.
Despite the urgency of this situation,
the antibiotic development pipeline is dwindling and multi-drug resistance is rampant, rendering the classical one - bug, one - drug approach obsolete.
Chloramphenicol represents the product of years of
antibiotic development.