Antibiotic resistance has been in the works starting from the day Alexander Fleming discovered Penicillin in 1928 ? microorganisms have been onto it, learning how to fool the more than one hundred different compounds scientist developed since.
As the WHO ? World Health Organization – classifies antimicrobial resistance as a very ?serious threat,? covering literally the entire world. Recently, however, a start-up company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has announced an incredible breakthrough: the discovery of the first new chemical compound since 1987 — a whole new class of antibiotic shown to be highly effective against common and life-threatening bacterial infections that have been classified as “resistance threats,” like Clostridium difficile, Mycobacterium tuberculous, Septicemia and Staphylococcus aureus.
While scientists have always thought different types of soil would always provide them with new and more potent compounds, 99 percent of microbes refuse to grow in laboratory settings, making it impossible to create the right environment for new discoveries.
Teixobactin, however, is not only a new compound; it is what researchers are calling a ?paradigm shift.? Until now, researchers were convinced that resistance to antibiotics was inevitable, and fighting to come up with a new drug before the old became useless was the only possible strategy fighting this reality. This latest antibiotic, however, is believed to not adapt so bacteria cannot become resistant.
In order to unearth this compound, scientists discovered a unique, proprietary method to isolate and cultivate previously unculturable microorganisms in the laboratory, thereby addressing this mind-blowing 70 year old problem in microbiology, and giving NovoBiotic sole access to a virtually unlimited, and as yet, unexploited source of novel natural product compound diversity.
Keep an eye out for NovoBiotic: This unique access to natural product diversity represents one of the most valuable assets for modern drug discovery, and the company intends to identify several new antibiotics from these novel sources. Longer term, NovoBiotic will leverage the value of this unique, microbe-derived chemical diversity in therapeutic areas such as oncology, atherosclerosis, and inflammatory diseases.
This newly discovered antibiotic — Teixobactin — will save millions, but it is about two years away from human tests, and around six years away from mass production.
