Prospects for new antibiotics: a molecule-centered perspective

There is a continuous need for iterative cycles of antibiotic discovery and development to deal with the selection of resistant pathogens that emerge as therapeutic application of an antibiotic becomes widespread. A short golden age of antibiotic discovery from nature followed by a subsequent golden half century of medicinal chemistry optimization of existing molecular scaffolds emphasizes the need for new antibiotic molecular frameworks. We bring a molecule-centered perspective to the questions of where will new scaffolds come from, when will chemogenetic approaches yield useful new antibiotics and what existing bacterial targets merit contemporary re-examination.