how are we fighting antibiotic resistant bacteria and what will we do when our antibiotics will no longer have effect?
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There’s a decent amount of research being done in the academic space into what are called anti microbial peptides (AMPs). These AMPs are essentially very small proteins (though much larger than antibiotics). They have the same problem of bacteria gaining resistance to them, though it is much much easier to discover new AMPs than antibiotics to help avoid that, and they have the capacity to be more bacterial strain specific. At the current moment they are a) more expensive than antibiotics to make and b) harder to deliver as a pill, so are really only being studied at universities, and not by any major pharmaceutical companies. But if we get to the point where there are no antibiotics that work, I’d imagine we’d switch to AMPs and at least greatly extend the time that we can effectively kill bacteria with drugs.
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