title: Antibiotics for emerging pathogens.
abstract: Antibiotic-resistant strains of pathogenic bacteria are increasingly prevalent in hospitals and the community. New antibiotics are needed to combat these bacterial pathogens, but progress in developing them has been slow. Historically, most antibiotics have come from a small set of molecular scaffolds whose functional lifetimes have been extended by generations of synthetic tailoring. The emergence of multidrug resistance among the latest generation of pathogens suggests that the discovery of new scaffolds should be a priority. Promising approaches to scaffold discovery are emerging; they include mining underexplored microbial niches for natural products, designing screens that avoid rediscovering old scaffolds, and repurposing libraries of synthetic molecules for use as antibiotics.
authors.affiliation: Department of Molecular Biology and Center for Computational and Integrative Biology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA 02114, USA. fischbach@fischbachgroup.org
authors.forename: Michael A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Fischbach
authors.forename: Christopher T
authors.initials: CT
authors.lastname: Walsh
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D000900:Anti-Bacterial Agents / Q000138:chemical synthesis / Q000737:chemistry / Q000494:pharmacology / Q000627:therapeutic use; D001424:Bacterial Infections / Q000188:drug therapy* / Q000382:microbiology; D021821:Communicable Diseases, Emerging / Q000188:drug therapy* / Q000382:microbiology; D015195:Drug Design; D055808:Drug Discovery; D024881:Drug Resistance, Bacterial; D024901:Drug Resistance, Multiple, Bacterial; D006090:Gram-Negative Bacteria / Q000187:drug effects; D006801:Humans; D055624:Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus / Q000187:drug effects; D008826:Microbial Sensitivity Tests; D009169:Mycobacterium tuberculosis / Q000187:drug effects; D054852:Small Molecule Libraries; D013211:Staphylococcus aureus / Q000187:drug effects; D013678:Technology, Pharmaceutical
chemical_list: D000900:Anti-Bacterial Agents; D054852:Small Molecule Libraries