New Bacteria, and Two Potential Antibiotics, Discovered in Soil

Tacrolimus was discovered in 1987 by a Japanese team led by pharmacologist Tohru Kino; it was among the first macrolide immunosuppressants discovered, preceded by the discovery of rapamycin (sirolimus) on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in 1975.[45] It is produced by a soil bacterium, Streptomyces tsukubensis.[46] The name tacrolimus is derived from "Tsukuba macrolide immunosuppressant".[47]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacrolimus

When you study organic synthesis, these kinds of structures are the Holy Grail. Sometimes it takes dozens of steps, and an overall yield of just a few percent to make them synthetically.

You want to cause current antibiotics to be less useful so pharma will invest more? Just allow generic versions.

If you want to pressure the pharma industry use laws.

This is another one of those schemes for getting a bunch of people killed in the service of medical crankery, isn't it.

You're joking, right?

Total antibiotic resistance is what we're trying to minimise, remember. You're proposing to achieve that in the long term by making it worse in the short term, but the only way that makes sense is if there is actually an abundance of new antibiotics "out there" waiting to be discovered, and the binding constraint currently limiting their development is that pharmaceutical companies can't be bothered researching them. But that is obviously not true -- steadily growing resistance has raised alarm for decades, and any pharma company that could produce a genuinely new antibiotic today would make immediate bank.

IOW, the incentives are already there and they aren't helping, so why take the extra step of making things deliberately worse?

Well, of course we don't know of a specific miracle drug they've denied us, because it isn't until after a drug is in wide use that you find out whether it's a miracle drug or not. But we can see that there were enormous numbers of miracle drugs in the 20 years immediately preceding the safety regulations, and almost none in the 63 years since then. There have definitely been some† but a very large slowdown is clearly evident if you look at the history. Most of even the important new drugs since then are slight variations on previously known molecules.

A reasonable inference from these observations is that safety regulations have denied us a lot of miracle drugs.

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† zidovudine, Paxlovid, oral rehydration therapy, ivermectin, propofol, SSRIs, sildenafil, acyclovir, misoprostol, ritonavir, and arguably buprenorphine come to mind; and time will tell whether lovastatin and semaglutide belong on this list or on the failures list with fen/phen and heroin.

> Many victims rapidly developed an especially viscous pneumonia and then, as one physician put it, “died struggling to clear their airways of a blood-tinged froth that sometimes gushed from their nose and mouth.” Medical science of the day was helpless before the onslaught. There was nothing Nelle’s doctor could do for her. Jack, who ordinarily attended mass on an intermittent basis, began lighting candles daily at the altar. The boys hovered anxiously, waiting for the doctor to pronounce the end. Instead, in desperation, he advised the family to feed her as much moldy cheese as she could stomach. There is no medical reason that a virus would respond to what the doctor may have supposed was a crude form of antibiotic. But Nelle recovered nonetheless, her indomitable will refusing to submit to a mere pathogen. For the rest of his life, my father would credit the cheese.

Good news if true. Antibiotics seem to be a bit of a Tragedy of the Commons situation though; my intuition is that people should do this but probably won't.