There may yet be hope in the fight against growing antibiotic resistance—while antibiotic efficacy has fallen as pathogens are increasingly developing resistance, antibiotic discovery has slowed in the last few decades, thanks to drugmakers shifting their focus to developing pharma products geared for managing chronic diseases, most of which are either genetic or lifestyle diseases. Researchers at the Rockefeller University in New York have discovered a new class of antibiotics, which they have named malacidins, which can be extracted from soil bacteria that are notoriously difficult to culture in labs and study. The findings of the research, published in Nature Microbiology, are encouraging. The new antibiotics fought off many common infections in lab and mice tests, eliminating some microbes that have become resistant to existing antibiotics. The researchers used genetic sequencing and combed through genetic material from 1,500 soil samples to identify and isolate the new antibiotics.
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