As bacterial infections impervious to drugs rise, so does the need to develop better antibiotics

As long as antibiotics have existed, so too has antibiotic resistance—the inevitable result as infectious bacteria continually evolve to evade the very drugs designed to kill them.

Today, antibiotic resistance is considered a major global health threat. In the United States, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that every year, at least 2.8 million people develop infections resistant to antibiotics, leading to more than 35,000 deaths.

Yet, in recent decades, antibiotic development has been slow, and no new classes of antibiotics have reached the market. Meanwhile, widespread use of the limited number of antibiotics currently available has spurred more bacterial strains to develop resistance, with additional strains already resistant to available antibiotics being discovered, often in hospitals. This situation is expected only to worsen over time, resulting in more drug-resistant bacterial infections and deaths.