A very interesting submission about the big medical news story of the day. The news suggests that we can all enjoy significant gains in finding effective treatments for dangerous infections. The era of antibiotics is probably not over yet, by a long way.

As noted in another comment, the underlying Nature article is up on the World Wide Web, [after edit:] and now shared to all of us by a subscriber who posted a subscriber's-sharing link in this thread.[1] I searched for some other news stories about this preliminary research finding to link to others based on independent reporting as well as the authors' press release and the Nature article. I found a story in Financial Times[2] reporting, "Teixobactin quickly kills Gram-positive bacteria, which are prominent in discussions of antibiotic resistance, including Clostridium difficile, Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Staphylococcus aureus.

"Neil Woodford, head of the antimicrobial resistance unit at Public Health England, commented:

"'The rise in antibiotic resistance is a threat to modern healthcare as we know it, so this discovery could potentially help to bridge the ever increasing gap between infections and the medicines we have available to treat them.'

"But Prof Woodford added: 'Although it is a step forward, this new discovery would not be suitable for treating infections caused by E. coli, Klebsiella or other Gram-negative bacteria.'"

The Washington Post reports,[3] "But all good things must eventually come to an end.

"'They didn't find resistance in a couple of simple tests, so it won’t happen in a minute, but there is no compound on this planet that bacteria will not develop resistance to,' Said Richard Novick, an NYU Langone Medical Center professor who wasn't involved in the study. 'But it would certainly happen more slowly with this one.'

"And unfortunately, the drug's genius mechanism is also its biggest flaw. It can only target so-called gram-positive bacteria, like staph, strep, and TB, because they're unprotected once their cell wall starts to break down. Gram-negative bacteria like E. coli and the organisms that cause many sexually transmitted infections have an outer membrane that Teixobactin can't penetrate. That's probably a safety mechanism built-in by the gram-negative bacteria that created Teixobactin in the first place."

That expert also comments that he would strictly limit application of this antibiotic at first to hospital settings, and that would be my policy recommendation too, to reduce the chance of producing selection pressure for resistant strains of bacteria. But this does look like it could be a big advance in clinical treatment of gram-positive bacterial infections resistant to other antibiotics.

The reporting in The Scientist,[4] already linked by an earlier participant, includes a comment on the laboratory technique used to find the microorganism that produces this new antibiotic: "'This is a very clever technique,' added Robert Austin, a physicist at Princeton University who studies the evolution of microbes and was not involved in the current study. 'The bacteriology community needs to get away from culturing bacteria on agar plates, because this will not lead to new antibiotics.'" That's a familiar principle in science: look in a new place, and make new discoveries.

The reporting in The Guardian[5] picks up on that idea in the words of another expert: "'What most excites me is the tantalising prospect that this discovery is just the tip of the iceberg,' said Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh. 'It may be that we will find more, perhaps many more, antibiotics using these latest techniques.'"

It's very likely that there are more antibiotics yet to be discovered, because all microorganisms live in a world full of other microorganisms, and haphazard adaptation to that environment must have produced selection pressure for many microorganisms to produce natural chemicals ("antibiotics") that kill off other kinds of microorganisms. Putting those chemicals into human bodies applies human knowledge to take advantage of the variety of life that has arisen from evolution.

[1] http://rdcu.be/bVbR

"A new antibiotic kills pathogens without detectable resistance" http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...

DOI: 10.1038/nature14098

[2] http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/701a3c36-95be-11e4-a390-00144...

[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/20...

[4] http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/41850/...

[5] http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/07/antibiotic-dr...