The Search for New Treatments for Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis

            The discovery of the first antibiotics during the early stages of the 20^th century forever changed the world of medicine. Many diseases that plagued mankind for millennia were now curable with a simple course of antibiotic treatment. Despite the discovery of several novel antibiotics over the course of the century, over-prescription as well as misuse of antibiotics has led to the creation of “superbugs” that have gained resistance to most of the drugs used to treat them. This development is particularly terrifying given that fact that current drug development has not been able to keep pace with the development of resistance in many different strains of bacteria. Part of this problem stems from little interest by pharmaceutical companies to invest in R&D for these drugs because antibiotics generally end up not being very lucrative investments. Additionally, the process of moving a drug from the discovery and optimization stages to large phase 3 clinical trials takes several years and several promising drugs are often screened out during this process.