Chemist hopes new chemical structures will jumpstart stalled antibiotic discovery efforts

"I routinely call hospitals and request their yearly antibiotic susceptibility testing data," said Washington University in St. Louis' Timothy Wencewicz. "The log might say, for example, that they've treated hundreds of patients for Acinetobacter baumanni, a bacterium brought into U.S. hospitals by soldiers wounded in the Iraq war, with 30 different antibiotics. The column listing the percentage of patients that responded to each antibiotic might say 1 percent or 2 percent. What happened to the other 99 percent of the patients? It's frightening. You should see at least one drug that has a 100 percent response rate. But you don't."

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