The drug developers fighting the antibiotic resistance problem

Though there is only limited interest from large pharmaceutical companies in developing antibiotics, a raft of smaller ones remains. They enable researchers to tackle the scientific challenge of battling antimicrobial resistance. The greatest prize of all is to discover a wholly new structural class of antibiotic that bacteria have never encountered, and therefore are unprepared to resist. Yet finding such substances and then proving to regulators that they are both effective and safe is massively difficult. So, many companies are also seeking ways to keep the older antibiotic structural classes effective and address their shortcomings.