War Against Resistant Bacteria: Why Scientists Are Not Finding New Antibiotics

The author of this article says this is the ‘latest despatch’ from the front lines of the war against antibiotic resistance. The war has been declared for a while now. And new frontiers are being opened up. But doctors and scientists are discovering that it is going to be a protracted battle involving much loss, hand-wringing, rethinking and re-strategizing.

The article begins with several real-life anecdotes of how huge the issue is. From heart failures because of penicillin-resistant bacteria, to a woman dying in quarantine because her infection was “resistant to every antibiotic the hospital had access to”, it seems bacteria are fighting back against the efforts of modern science horrifyingly well.

Exploring the curious history of how antibiotics first began to be used for therapy, the author, a chemical scientist, wonders why producing new antibiotics (to bolster the fight as it were) is proving to be difficult.

One of the main reasons: it is easy to find new antiseptics that kill microbes on the skin and surface of tissues. But antiseptics are not antibiotics and the thin line between them confuses many. Because the key to antibiotic function, unlike that of antiseptics, is “exploiting the fact that bacteria are similar to human cells without being identical.”

The catch here is antibiotic resistance is neither new nor surprising. Most bacteria are built to acquire resistance and what’s more, the bacteria with the resistant gene can also ‘share’ it with other bacteria, thus building up their population. War, indeed!

And because bacteria are so ‘devious’, all the obvious antibiotics have already been discovered and new approaches are near non-existent. Cryptic antibiotics is gaining traction but no one yet knows whether it will work. The author believes organic chemistry, which has already helped scientists fine-tune molecules, might hold the key.

What is certain though, as the author rightly says, is we cannot give up because the bacteria will not.