Humans May Lose Battle with Bacteria, Medicinal Chemist's Research Shows

Link: Humans May Lose Battle with Bacteria, Medicinal Chemist's Research Shows.

These days, with so-called “superbugs” like methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) making news, resistance is becoming a major public health problem. “Resistance that started in a hospital setting quickly spread into the community, and now resistance is essentially all around us,” Mitscher said. “That does not mean to say we’re all going to die in agony in the immediate future. But this is an important phenomenon that needs to be addressed more carefully than we have in the past.” Part of the solution is to use antibiotics sparingly for industrial, agricultural and medical purposes. When an antibiotic is called for to treat an infection the best one should be used with appropriate intensity. Mitscher said that drug corporations must develop antibiotics with the potential not only to kill microbes but also to inhibit their ability to mutate. These new drugs would be made more effective still if they enlisted the body’s own immune system to battle infections. Alas, because of the economics of the drug industry, Mitscher said such “triple treat” antibiotics might be a long time coming. “The pace of antibiotic discovery has fallen off, partly because the intensive research on them has lead to increasingly diminishing returns,” said Mitscher. “Pharmaceutical firms have, for a variety of commercial reasons, de-emphasized antibiotic research in recent decades.”