No matter how carefully we use the antibiotics we have, drug resistant infections will continue to gain ground, forcing us to develop entirely new classes of antibiotics to defeat them. With the last new class introduced more than 20 years ago, we have reached a dangerous tipping point, with drug resistant infections expected to begin outpacing antibiotic innovation.
Last week, however, brought a rare and long-awaited breakthrough. After decades of stagnation, not one but two new first-in-class antibiotics were approved by the Food and Drug Administration within just a day of each other. Both offer urgently needed new oral treatment options for gonorrhea — a disease with 82 million new cases worldwide each year — and both work through novel mechanisms that are active against drug-resistant strains.
