Pneumonia is another great example. Most of the pneumonias we know about are viral, but typically people will come in, they ll hear that word, the doctor will be a little worried, they ll go home with an antibiotic. So it s a dilemma. The only solution is to develop new antibiotics. Easier said that done.
Research takes time and a lot of money.
And the approval process takes years. But they know the old approaches won t work. Super bugs require more sophisticated weapons. Some of the most promising avenues appear to be in genetic engineering, something that big drug companies don t know much about. So several of them working to find new bacterial targets have gone into partnership with the biotech company Cubist Pharmaceuticals.