Journal
ANGEWANDTE CHEMIE-INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Volume 53, Issue 34, Pages 8840-8869Publisher
WILEY-V C H VERLAG GMBH
DOI: 10.1002/anie.201310843
Keywords
antibiotics; chemical synthesis; drug discovery; semisynthesis
Categories
Funding
- U.S. government
- NIH [GM099233]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The discovery and implementation of antibiotics in the early twentieth century transformed human health and wellbeing. Chemical synthesis enabled the development of the first antibacterial substances, organoarsenicals and sulfa drugs, but these were soon outshone by a host of more powerful and vastly more complex antibiotics from nature: penicillin, streptomycin, tetracycline, and erythromycin, among others. These primary defences are now significantly less effective as an unavoidable consequence of rapid evolution of resistance within pathogenic bacteria, made worse by widespread misuse of antibiotics. For decades medicinal chemists replenished the arsenal of antibiotics by semisynthetic and to a lesser degree fully synthetic routes, but economic factors have led to a subsidence of this effort, which places society on the precipice of a disaster. We believe that the strategic application of modern chemical synthesis to antibacterial drug discovery must play a critical role if a crisis of global proportions is to be averted.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available