The World Health Organization warns that we are falling far behind in the search for new antibiotics to replace those that have been rendered ineffective due to drug resistance.
This news comes as part of the WHO’s recent report, entitled “Antibacterial agents in clinical development — an analysis of the antibacterial clinical development pipeline, including tuberculosis.”
Authored by some of the world’s leading physicians, microbiologists and drug development experts, the report argues that many antibiotics currently under development aren’t actually new at all. That’s because the 10 or so workable treatments in question are slightly altered versions of preexisting antibiotics classes. They could still prove effective — but only for a short amount of time.
So what happens when those treatments stop working?
STAYING AHEAD OF THE HEALTH EMERGENCY
Antibiotic resistance remains a growing concern around the world. While antibiotics were once a mainstay of treating potentially deadly and disfiguring infections, we have now used these drugs so widely that the targeted pathogens have developed immunity to our best defenses.
That means that doctors must rely on older — and, oftentimes, more damaging — antibiotics. But, as recent research has shown, even these antibiotics are starting to fail asresistance grows.
That’s why scientists have been looking to novel places for antibiotics, from our own bodies to the soil beneath our feet. And these efforts are yielding success with the potential for several new sources of antibiotics.
As the World Health Organization notes, though, we need to focus on innovative treatments in the short term to avoid a resurgence of harmful disease when our effective antibiotics stocks are low.
Diseases like drug-resistant tuberculosis and infections like E.coli and MRSA – the latter of which can cause severe and oftentimes deadly infections in hospitals and places like nursing homes — are all major threats as antibiotics resistance increases.
WHO’s new report identifies 51 new antibiotic treatments that could target these so-called priority resistant pathogens. However, when researchers examined the candidate treatments, they found that only eight meet the necessary criteria. The rest rely on existing pathways that will have limited value for treatment within a very short period of time.