What Lies Within: The Human Body Might Well Be One of the Best Sources for New Antibiotics

In 1991, a group of Italian researchers announced that they had isolated a new antibiotic from a chemical soup brewed with a soil-dwelling bacteria called Planobispora rosea. The drug was a type of thiopeptide, effective against grampositive bacteria like Staphylococcus aureus, P. acnes, and C. difficile but uncooperative in terms of being harnessed for human medicines. Little came of that work until around 2012, when pharma giant Novartis reported that it had begun to experiment with the original drug's structure, ultimately creating a semisynthetic version with enough solubility that it could be effectively administered to human patients. In 2015, that antibiotic successfully made it through a multicenter phase II clinical trial, where it proved to be both safe and reasonably effective in the 30 C. difficile patients who completed the study.