Advances in antibiotic drug discovery: reducing the barriers for antibiotic development

Antibiotic drug discovery has been an essential field of research since the early 1900s, but the threat from infectious bacteria has only increased over the decades because of the emergence of widespread multidrug resistance. In this review, we discuss the recent advances in natural product, computational and medicinal chemistry that have reinvigorated the field of antibiotic drug discovery while giving perspective on how easily, both in cost and in expertise, these methods can be implemented by other researchers with the goal of increasing the number of scientists contributing to this public health crisis.