The Fatally Slow Quest For Next-Gen Antibiotics

Many bacteria have stopped responding to the drugs that used to kill them. And drugmakers have stopped responding to alarms about it. Can the system possibly be fixed before the bacteria win?

- Sarah Elizabeth Richards

IN JANUARY 2019, Mike Dudley got a call that his 69-year-old brother-in-law had died a mere 48 hours after checking into hospital with flu-like symptoms. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Just five months earlier, they’d been backpacking together in California’s Ansel Adams Wilderness and Yosemite National Park. The news didn’t make any sense.

Then Dudley learned the detail that made his heart sink: the cause was bacterial sepsis – a condition resulting from the body’s response to the chemicals it produces when fighting an infection – after a staph infection had invaded his body.

Although Dudley, an infectious-disease specialist, knew all about out-of-control infections that could kill otherwise healthy patients, his brother-in-law’s death was a stark reminder that they can turn so deadly so fast, overwhelming the antibiotics we have to try to stop them.

Like so many experts in his field, Dudley has been living with a quiet anxiety about what could happen if the drugs we depend on to treat everything from pneumonia to gonorrhea to urinary-tract infections someday stopped working. He’s spent the past 14 years racing to develop new antibiotics at a time when microbes are mutating faster than ever to evade or “resist” the drugs we use to kill them.

This problem of antibiotic resistance is already bigger than anyone thought. Last November, the US’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a disturbing report: more than 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections occur in the US each year, it said, and kill more than 35,000 people.