The DOI matches its Crossref record; 47 of the 47 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Antibiotics: past, present and future
Open accessAbstract
The first antibiotic, salvarsan, was deployed in 1910. In just over 100 years antibiotics have drastically changed modern medicine and extended the average human lifespan by 23 years. The discovery of penicillin in 1928 started the golden age of natural product antibiotic discovery that peaked in the mid-1950s. Since then, a gradual decline in antibiotic discovery and development and the evolution of drug resistance in many human pathogens has led to the current antimicrobial resistance crisis. Here we give an overview of the history of antibiotic discovery, the major classes of antibiotics and where they come from. We argue that the future of antibiotic discovery looks bright as new technologies such as genome mining and editing are deployed to discover new natural products with diverse bioactivities. We also report on the current state of antibiotic development, with 45 drugs currently going through the clinical trials pipeline, including several new classes with novel modes of action that are in phase 3 clinical trials. Overall, there are promising signs for antibiotic discovery, but changes in financial models are required to translate scientific advances into clinically approved antibiotics.
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Citations
Cites
Natural products as sources of new drugs from 1981 to 2014
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antiSMASH 5.0: updates to the secondary metabolite genome mining pipeline
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Drugs for bad bugs: confronting the challenges of antibacterial discovery
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A new antibiotic kills pathogens without detectable resistance
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Natural product discovery: past, present, and future
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Discovery of microbial natural products by activation of silent biosynthetic gene clusters
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Human commensals producing a novel antibiotic impair pathogen colonization
Zipperer, A., Konnerth, M. C., Laux, C., Berscheid, A., Janek, D., Weidenmaier, C., Burian, M., Schilling, N. A., Slavetinsky, C., Marschal, M., et al. (2016) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature18634 · Cited by 938
Alternatives to antibiotics—a pipeline portfolio review
Czaplewski, L., Bax, R., Clokie, M., Dawson, M., Fairhead, H., Fischetti, V. A., Foster, S., Gilmore, B. F., Hancock, R. E. W., Harper, D., et al. (2016) · The Lancet Infectious Diseases · doi:10.1016/s1473-3099(15)00466-1 · Cited by 848
Novel antibody-antibiotic conjugate eliminates intracellular S. aureus
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Cited by
Antimicrobial peptides: Structure, mechanism, and modification
Chen, N., & Jiang, C. (2023) · European Journal of Medicinal Chemistry · doi:10.1016/j.ejmech.2023.115377 · Cited by 279
Environmental hotspots for antibiotic resistance genes
Kunhikannan, S., Thomas, C. J., Franks, A. E., Mahadevaiah, S., Kumar, S., & Petrovski, S. (2021) · MicrobiologyOpen · doi:10.1002/mbo3.1197 · Cited by 184
Fu, Y., Dou, Q., Smalla, K., Wang, Y., Johnson, T. A., Brandt, K. K., Mei, Z., Liao, M., Hashsham, S. A., Schäffer, A., et al. (2023) · mLife · doi:10.1002/mlf2.12101 · Cited by 65
Hurkacz, M., Dobrek, L., & Wiela-Hojeńska, A. (2021) · Molecules · doi:10.3390/molecules26247456 · Cited by 60
Mafe, A. N., & Büsselberg, D. (2025) · Pharmaceutics · doi:10.3390/pharmaceutics17070820 · Cited by 18
Metadata
- Authors
- Hutchings, M. I., Truman, A. W., & Wilkinson, B.
- Venue
- Current Opinion in Microbiology
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2019-10
- Volume
- 51
- Pages
- 72-80
- ISSN
- 1369-5274 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2989135569
- Cited by
- 2,370
- References
- 47
- FWCI
- 29.36
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
