Resistance isn’t futile – how to tackle drug-resistant superbugs

Low profit margins and the difficulty of finding new drugs has led to big pharma shutting down its antibiotics programmes. But now researchers are adopting new approaches to tackle drug-resistant superbugs

Matt Cooper, a medical chemist at the University of Queensland, Australia, puffs out his cheeks and scratches his head. He's trying to explain why the pipeline for new antibiotics is quite so dry. "The problem," he says, "is that finding new antibiotics is now really, really hard."

It's a worrying concession given how badly we need new drugs. Drug-resistant superbugs already kill hundreds of thousands of people every year and, according to the Antimicrobial Review (AMR) committee chaired by Jim O'Neill (see box), if left unchecked they will kill 10 million of us every year by 2050. That's more than will be killed by cancer, diarrhoeal disease or road traffic accidents.