Why New Antibiotics Are So Hard to Find
An 86-year-old patient arrives with a grisly foot injury.1 It’s badly infected—not a surprise, given his chronic untreated Type 2 diabetes. What is surprising is that meropenem, a broad spectrum antibiotic, and vancomycin, known as the antibiotic of last resort, have absolutely no effect.
The doctors know something bad is going on. But, even expecting the worst, the test results surprise them. The man’s foot is infected with not one, but three different bacteria: Staphylococcus aureus, Acinetobacter baumannii, and Acinetobacter lwoffii. Each is multi-drug resistant. The hospital, located in Brazil, simply doesn’t have the resources to deal with the situation. The patient is transferred to a larger hospital, but enough damage has already been done to his foot to require amputation.
This real story, reported in 2012, is one of many. There was also the 57-year old woman in Washington, D.C. whose heart failure was caused by a penicillin-resistant bacteria.2 Or the woman who died in quarantine after being admitted to a Nevada hospital with an infection resistant to every antibiotic the hospital had access to.3
An estimated 2 million Americans are infected with antibiotic resistant microbes every year and, of these, about 23,000 die. Humans have known how
