Worldwide Clinical Demand for Antibiotics: Is It a Real Countdown?

Abstract

Antibiotics are antimicrobial agents primarily produced by certain bacteria and fungi. These drugs are some of the biological weapons used by the producers to survive in their dense and multispecies communities where the resources could be scarce. Thus, the microorganisms, as antibiotic producers, also have the skills to avoid the antibiotic affect from immemorial time. However, the antibiotic resistance is a current global health threat because of the overuse, abuse, or use of antibiotics. Nowadays, resistance to all the antibiotic classes has emerged, which results in 700,000 annual deaths due to the drug-resistant diseases, and forecasts are dramatic for the coming years. This chapter reviews the evolution of the antibiotics discovery, the worldwide antibiotics resistances threat, their economical and clinical impact, as well as how the academia and the enterprises are facing the need of new antibiotics discovery or antimicrobial therapies implementation.

Keywords: Antibiotic; Antibiotic discovery; Antibiotic resistance; Bacteria; Clinical trials; Fungi; Preclinical trials; Resistome.