GoKawiilNatural products have been the cornerstone of antibiotic development since Alexander Fleming found that a compound, penicillin, made by a mould could kill bacteria. Today, natural products and molecules inspired by these compounds comprise more than 80% of clinically approved antibiotics. The spread of antibiotic resistance among pathogenic bacteria, however, has rendered entire classes of these life-saving drugs ineffective1, posing a global threat to human health and modern medicine that must be met with a robust effort to discover, develop and deploy new treatments. Fortunately, computational, microbiological and medicinal-chemistry studies over the past decade (see refs 2–7, for example) suggest that approaches inspired by nature have the potential to overcome multidrug resistance. Writing in Nature, Gordzevich et al.8 report a fresh strategy for using natural products to combat antibiotic resistance, inspired by a discovery in bacteria.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-01804-1
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Competing Interests S.T.R. is an employee of Genentech, Inc., a member of the Roche Group.
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