Mining soil for new antibiotics

Methicillin-resistant Staph aureus. Photo NIAID

The beginning of 2015 brought (potentially) good news for medicine: the discovery of a new antibiotic - teixobactin - isolated from soil bacteria. This result was published in Nature on January 22. (Unfortunately the whole text is not visible without payment or subscription.) Many newspapers and news outlets covered the story in early January, for instance the Guardian, and the New York Times. Teixobactin is a small peptide that acts as an inhibitor of cell wall synthesis in Gram-positive bacteria, which means it can kill pathogens like drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (often referred to as MRSA, or methicillin-resistant S. aureus).

The issue at stake here is, of course, the increasing prevalence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria worldwide, a situation well summarized in an article at Swissinfo.ch. We have thus seen a dramatic increase in resistant strains of, for instance, S. aureus, Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae. Who or what is to blame? Most probably the overuse of antibiotics, not only in humans but also in animals. It is frightening to know that some pathogenic strains can survive our entire arsenal of antibiotics, while new potent drugs are extremely hard to find. Some simple solutions have helped mitigate the problem, notably more effective and systematic hand disinfection by hopital personnel, but this will not prevent all cases of infection. New antimicrobials are clearly needed, but where to find them?