If the drugs don’t work

Life would be very different without antibiotics. In my own life, if simple treatments for bacterial infections weren’t available, then the osteomyelitis that infected my shoulder when I was a young boy would have required surgery to remove the necrotic bone, perhaps even amputation.

Generations of people have benefited from the safety of small molecule drugs that can cure infections, and those drugs have transformed medicine. Yet the rise of resistant bacterial strains caused by overusing and misusing antibiotics mean that a post-antibiotic era is now a realistic prospect. In this issue, we’re looking at the ways chemistry is helping to solve the problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR).