Since 2017, just 16 antibiotics have gained widespread regulatory approval – mostly close relatives of medicines already in use and so unlikely to evade resistance for long. The development of new ones is a slow and unprofitable business, curative medicines being less lucrative than ones treating longer-term conditions. More broadly, it is hard to see where the stream of other new antibiotics we need could possibly come from. The prevailing scientific evaluation is that when it comes to antibiotics, we must run very fast indeed just to stay in the same place. Sadly, the scale of future breakthroughs is going to seem miserly compared with the curative bonanza of the 20th century.

Source: The Guardian December 29, 2025 21:57 UTC