Why is it so difficult to find new antibiotics?

The discovery of antibiotics revolutionized medicine and gave millions of people the opportunity to access lives of longer and higher quality, fighting infections and diseases that killed regularly in extraordinary quantities.However, we have become accustomed to them and finding new antibiotics has proved a great challenge.

The challenge of finding new antibiotics in this modern era

Almost 90 years ago, the Scottish physician Alexander Fleming returned on vacation and was surprised to find Penicillium in Petri dishes he had left in his laboratory, located in the basement of St.Mary's Hospital in London.

For the 1950s, which is considered the golden age of the discovery of antibiotics, a series of new medicines had been found , for the collective benefit of mankind.

Now, nowadays, scientists are looking for new and more impressive advances, testing or microbes in sources as diverse as soil, caves and Komodo dragon blood , as well as developing new synthetic drugs made in the laboratory.

However, despite these remarkable advances , we are running out of effective antibiotics , the drugs that fight infection and are essential for the vast majority of medical procedures, from organ transplantation to the treatment of food poisoning.

Deadly penicillin-resistant bacteria, or more than 100 different antibiotics since they developed, are already killing 700,000 people each year. If nothing is done, the global toll could increase to 10 million per year by 2050.

Faced with this very serious and imminent problem, why has it been so difficult to find the new antibiotics that we need so much in this era of incredible efforts and medical and scientific advances s?

This is partly due to the scientific challenge and partly in the broken economy of research and development work .

Even Fleming went through a long period of research and collaboration before the 1940s, penicillin became the first antibiotic in the world .

And Fleming himself warned from the first days that bacteria could become resistant to these new medicines.

All microorganisms evolve and those that develop defenses against antibiotics survive, while the defenseless die.The more antibiotics we use, faster the process of resistance development of bacteria becomes.

Why is it so difficult to find new antibiotics?

The result of misuse and excessive use of antibiotics, in health hum ana and animal, is a continuous race to stay ahead of the superbacteria .The long process that a substance must meet before being approved for human consumption, proposes a time constraint that represents a disadvantage in this career.

On the other hand, the economic factor comes into play.Antibiotics are not only complex to develop, the most innovative new products cannot be sold freely either.

Instead, they should be reserved for serious cases, such as colistin, the "drug of last resort" and this does not represent an attractive investment opportunity .Therefore, in the last 30 years pharmaceutical companies have significantly decreased their work by developing new antibacterial therapies and as a result have invented new classes of antibiotics for decades.

What do you think? Do you know this situation?

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