First New Antibiotic in 30 Years
If you’re like me and not on the up and up with the world of antibiotics, you’ll be surprised to learn that doctors have used the same antibiotics for decades to fight disease. In that time, the diseases have fought back, many developing resistances to common antibiotics. Early in 2015, a team from Northeastern University in Massachusetts put a notch in the win column for medicine when it discovered Teixobactin, the first new antibiotic in 30 years. The team used it to treat drug resistant disease-infected mice and hope to begin human trials within two years. If those trials go well, Teixobactin could be instrumental in treating the mutated, resistant diseases, and the method used to discover it could lead to more antibiotic findings.