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Tuberculosis

Drug discovery goes au naturel

Nature volume 506, pages 436–437 (2014)Cite this article

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A Correction to this article was published on 16 April 2014

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In a study that showcases the potential of semisynthetic drug design, structural modification of an existing antibiotic with little activity against Mycobacterium tuberculosis has generated a new class of effective antitubercular lead.

Discovering useful drugs to treat tuberculosis is not an exercise for the faint of heart. Screening for agents that inhibit the growth of the causative mycobacterium produces very few hits, and optimizing those hits into drug-like 'lead' molecules is exceptionally difficult, owing to the bacterium's impermeable cell envelope. Even armed with a promising lead, animal models and early-stage clinical trials have little predictive value, and the long duration of therapy currently required to treat tuberculosis makes safety hurdles much higher than for most bacterial infections. So, an attractive strategy, and one that lies at the heart of a report by Lee et al.1 in Nature Medicine, is to repurpose an existing antibiotic class that is already known to be safe and effective in other infections, but that has poor antitubercular activity.

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Figure 1: Natural complexity.

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References

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  1. Clifton E. Barry is in the Tuberculosis Research Section, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Bethesda, Maryland 20892-3206, USA.,

    Clifton E. Barry

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  1. Clifton E. Barry
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Correspondence to Clifton E. Barry.

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Barry, C. Drug discovery goes au naturel. Nature 506, 436–437 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/506436a

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