A radically simple idea may open the door to a new world of antibiotics

The problem developing new antibiotics is not the science it is economic and regulatory. Let&#x27;s say you are crazy enough to pay the enormous cost of bring a new antibiotic through the regulatory process, your new antibiotic doesn&#x27;t get used by doctors. They put the new antibiotic on the shelf to be used in emergencies when all the other antibiotics haven&#x27;t worked. Your sales are then near zero. This is why all the major pharmaceutical companies have shut down their antibiotic divisions.<p>What we need to work towards is a large cash payment on approval of each drug or a guaranteed minimium annual payment. Once we have this we will start to get the new antibiotics we need.

The ability to culture organisms is the single most important roadblock to understanding. Even if a new culturing technique only enables you to grow .00001 % of the bacterial species out there that is still a 100 fold increase in the number that we can now study at scale. DNA sequencing has made it possible to identify new species by looking at their 16s ribosomal RNA, but if you are looking for small molecules and proteins you have to be able to amplify the whole organism, not just its nucleic acids.<p>Huge deal, expect much more to come from microbiologists using this culturing technique.

The article gives the impression that a lot of biology involves ad-hoc, artisanal techniques that have been somewhat standardized and automated over the years. And that the standardization and automation involved can actually stand in the way of changing an approach.<p>There was an article about the standardization of laboratory mice - it allows large scale, reproducible results but guarantees you won&#x27;t things that can&#x27;t be learned from the single, genetically uniform mouse type that is used.