Antibiotic resistance: retrospect and prospect

After discovery, antibiotics changed modern medicine substantially and augmented human life expectancy by 20 years. The emergence of multidrug-resistant pathogens and the dearth of new antibiotics led to the current soaring crisis of antibiotic resistance. According to the recent O’Neill report published by The UK around 10 million people may die from infections caused by multidrug-resistant superbugs by 2050. In this regard drug discovery is one of the most related recommendations. In this chapter, an overview of antibiotics and the evolution of antibiotic resistance will be given along with some future aspects. For instance there may be a bright future to come for drug discovery, as a lot of high throughput technologies like genome editing and mining are being deployed to find the new antibacterial natural products with different bioactivities or engineered/chimeric therapeutic proteins, that is, phage endolysins, lysibodies, and enzybiotics.