New class of antibiotics discovered?

[BalticSailor]

@Lewk: What Rand said. The most significant targets for medicinal agents for the last few decades include cancer (I'd call that one a great success, from the viewpoint of available treatment options; sufficiently early diagnosis is where we still kinda suck at, as there's a point beyond which the chemo just doesn't stand a chance), neurogenerative diseases (I'd call that field a great failure; it has cost "Big Pharma" huge sums of money, thousands of man-hours spent in vain, several companies have officially declared that they're throwing in the towel, and we're still not significantly closer to anything helpful) and diabetes and obesity (apparently, cost-effective enough to be considered a success). Compared to those, relatively little has been done in the field of antibiotics, though that has changed lately, as it becomes more and more evident that we're fucked, as far as our ability to reliably kill those microscopic beasts is concerned. Antibiotics have helped hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, but they have been equally helpful to natural selection.

As far as the drug mentioned in the article is concerned, I don't know if it deserves to be considered as defining a new class. It's pretty damn close to being a cyclic peptide (if it weren't for the single thiazolidine fragment, which does structurally disqualify the molecule from being called a peptide) class, bunch of which are already used. Good news, though, of course. We do live in the age where stories of pre-penicillin times seem extremely remote from our everyday life - and we do not want to go back there. However, without new antibiotics, we might.

[Lewkowski]

@Lewk: What Rand said. The most significant targets for medicinal agents for the last few decades include cancer (I'd call that one a great success, from the viewpoint of available treatment options; sufficiently early diagnosis is where we still kinda suck at, as there's a point beyond which the chemo just doesn't stand a chance), neurogenerative diseases (I'd call that field a great failure; it has cost "Big Pharma" huge sums of money, thousands of man-hours spent in vain, several companies have officially declared that they're throwing in the towel, and we're still not significantly closer to anything helpful) and diabetes and obesity (apparently, cost-effective enough to be considered a success). Compared to those, relatively little has been done in the field of antibiotics, though that has changed lately, as it becomes more and more evident that we're fucked, as far as our ability to reliably kill those microscopic beasts is concerned. Antibiotics have helped hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, but they have been equally helpful to natural selection.

As far as the drug mentioned in the article is concerned, I don't know if it deserves to be considered as defining a new class. It's pretty damn close to being a cyclic peptide (if it weren't for the single thiazolidine fragment, which does structurally disqualify the molecule from being called a peptide) class, bunch of which are already used. Good news, though, of course. We do live in the age where stories of pre-penicillin times seem extremely remote from our everyday life - and we do not want to go back there. However, without new antibiotics, we might.

Good information.