A new antibiotic came from bacteria nobody had grown

Researchers at Northeastern University and NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals used the iChip, a device developed earlier, to grow these uncultured soil bacteria in their natural environment instead of a petri dish, then screened the resulting cultures for new antibiotic compounds.

One compound, named teixobactin, killed Staphylococcus aureus and Mycobacterium tuberculosis by binding a cell-wall building block the bacteria cannot easily alter, a different target than most existing antibiotics use. In repeated laboratory attempts, the researchers could not generate any teixobactin-resistant mutants of either bacterium, and the compound was effective in infected mice.

No detectable resistance in lab testing does not guarantee resistance will never emerge once a drug is used widely in people, since real-world use creates far more opportunities for bacteria to adapt than a lab experiment does. Teixobactin has not yet become an approved medicine, and its antibiotic activity is limited mainly to certain hard-to-treat Gram-positive bacteria rather than all pathogens.

The soil had been hiding a weapon unreachable.