The next antibiotic is in a pile of dirt somewhere. The next virus antibody is in an animal somewhere. Nature is way better than humans at scale for biochemistry and has been doing it way longer. Before modern computer or X-ray based drug design there were whole animal and collect-and-test. Chemists can tune better than nature but evolutionary pressure is amazing and can be harvested.
There's an old Theodore Sturgeon story about this, where a man makes a tiny, ultra-fast civilization 'in his basement' and then learns from them, not-quite passing off this inventions as his own.
It seems that almost every story about wanting to protect some natural, undeveloped area includes some line about maybe the next antibiotic will be discovered here.
However, I think we are beyond that now. I don't know if there really has been a clinically relevant antibiotic with actual use in the real world discovered in the last 20 years in such circumstances.
Now, most antibiotic development is based on knowledge of chemistry/biochemistry and understanding resistance mechanisms.
And looking at "natural" antibiotics, many of even the effective ones have very bad toxicity profiles (see streptomycin and kidney and ear toxicity) or have resistance quickly develop (see penicillin).
Although not an antibiotic, it is interesting that the most effective Covid treatments were not ones discovered in nature (for example Ivermectin and quinine), but rather the vaccine, engineered with mRNA precisely targeting the spike protein which was known through sequencing and protein folding analysis.
Although we should conserve the diversity of our natural world, I don't think that new antibiotics are one of the major reasons to do so.
I don't know if there really has been a clinically relevant
antibiotic with actual use in the real world discovered in
the last 20 years in such circumstances.
It's difficult to know if this is because we've exhausted nature's supply of antibiotics, or if we haven't found any because we haven't been looking.
Over the past 10-20 years there have been many articles about how pharma companies have largely abandoned the quest for better antibiotics in favor of more profitable lines of medicine.
As a total outsider, I have no way to judge which one is true.
> However, I think we are beyond that now. I don't know if there really has been a clinically relevant antibiotic with actual use in the real world discovered in the last 20 years in such circumstances.
IMO, the main reason is IP law. You can't patent a natural phenomenon so there is no incentive for companies to go looking for drugs out in nature. There might be a huge societal upside but there is basically no profitability.
mRNA in vaccines doesn’t target anything, but encode the antigens (the spike protein in the case of SARS-CoV-2 ones) that will be used by the host immune system to synthetize the antibodies that will target precisely the same antigen present in natural viruses. These antibodies are, in a way, still being discovered by natural processes.
