3 ms·

Good point. But I hope in the near future out ability to develop new antibiotics speeds up. So far we've mostly borrowed pre-existing compounds from fungi and s

• rsheridan6 17y ago
  I'm way outside my area of expertise here, but I would think that as chemistry modeling improves it would become easier to rationally modify a molecule, or design one from scratch, that could either kill a bug or disable the beta-lactamases, or whatever, that the bugs use to disable older antibiotics. I don't know how far off that is now. It might even be possible now. I do know that there aren't strong incentives for pharmaceutical companies to develop antibiotics. There's a lot more money in coming up with some new statin that lots of people will take for 20 years than a life-saving antibiotic that will be taken for 10 days by a smaller number of patients - especially when hospitals practice "antimicrobial stewardship," meaning that they don't prescribe newer, better antibiotics unless they think the old ones won't do.