Revolutionizing Antibiotics: Breakthroughs in Discovery and Development

Antibiotics are chemical substances that inhibit the growth of bacteria and other microbes. Antibiotics should cause minimal or no toxicity and should be effective against a particular infection. The early era of 1940-1960s is considered as golden age of antibiotics. Most of the antibiotics are becoming resistant to various bacteria, fungi and spores, leading to necessity of new antibiotics to combat resistance. Significant technological advances have provided researchers access to biological events and repositioned their mind set for antibiotic research. Target based screening, cell based adenosine diphosphates, genomics, high throughput screening, whole genome sequencing, bioinformatics based predictions, transcriptions and metabolic profiling are some of the innovative technologies used in antibiotics drug discovery. Research community is working tirelessly to discover newer antibiotic compounds due to its increasing demand. Discovery of newer antibiotics is based on symbiotic relationship between researchers, regulators, antibiotic production, environmental and intracellular signalling. An overview of some of the technologies used in the creation of brand-new, innovative antibiotics is provided by this review.