Professor Greg Cook and Dr Adam Heikal discuss how our armoury of antimicrobials has been eroded and the vision of developing narrow spectrum agents that specifically target bad bacteria, with little or no collateral damage to the good bacteria normally present in our bodies.
Until recently, antimicrobial discovery focused on existing drugs, relying on chemical tinkering to produce new versions of old compounds. Now they have taken biomedical research technologies such as high-throughput screening of bacteria cells and redeveloped them for agritech drug discovery. This allows discovery of antimicrobials that are both specific for a particular target bacterial species and, importantly, work against the target bug under conditions relevant to the disease or environment.