Hope amid challenging times for antibiotic developers

In recent years, much of the news coverage around antibiotic development has been, for lack of a better word, gloomy.

There’s good reason for that. As reports from the World Health Organization and other concerned groups have concluded, the pipeline for new antibiotics is not nearly robust enough to meet the growing challenge of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Many large pharmaceutical companies have abandoned development because there’s simply not enough money to be made on new antibiotics, especially with the increasing focus on antibiotic stewardship.

That leaves the bulk of antibiotic research and development (R&D) to small biotechnology companies which, despite having promising antibacterial and antifungal products that are urgently needed, face funding shortfalls and the prospect of bankruptcy.