Name: How can we solve the antibiotic resistance crisis? - Gerry Wright
Uploaded: 2020-03-17T04:33:15.000Z
Duration: 6 min 23 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Antibiotics: behind the scenes,  they enable much of modern medicine.

but also to safely facilitate everything  from surgery to chemotherapy

even routine medical procedures  can lead to life-threatening infections.

Antibiotics are chemicals  that prevent the growth of bacteria.

Unfortunately, some bacteria  have become resistant

At the same time,  we’ve stopped discovering new ones.

Still, there’s hope that we can get ahead  of the problem.

But first, how did we  get into this situation?

The first widely used antibiotic  was penicillin,

In his 1945 Nobel Prize  acceptance speech,

Fleming warned that bacterial resistance  had the potential to ruin

resistant bacteria  already began to appear.

pharmaceutical companies  countered the problem of resistance

At first this was a highly successful—  and highly profitable— enterprise.

Newly discovered antibiotics  were often only effective

whereas the first ones  had been broadly applicable.

but it does mean that fewer doses  of these drugs could be sold—

In the early days,  antibiotics were heavily overprescribed,

including for viral infections  they had no effect on.

Scrutiny around prescriptions increased,  which is good, but also lowered sales.

At the same time,  companies began to develop more drugs

that are taken over a patient’s lifetime,

like blood pressure  and cholesterol medications,

and later anti-depressants  and anti-anxiety medications.

Because they are taken indefinitely,  these drugs more profitable.

By the mid-1980s, no new chemical classes  of antibiotics were discovered.

But bacteria continued to acquire  resistance and pass it along

by sharing genetic information  between individual bacteria

Now bacteria that are resistant  to many antibiotics are common,

and increasingly some strains  are resistant to all our current drugs.

We need to control the use  of existing antibiotics, create new ones,

combat resistance to new  and existing drugs,

and find new ways to fight  bacterial infections.

The largest consumer  of antibiotics is agriculture,

which uses antibiotics not only  to treat infections

but to promote the growth of food animals.

increases the bacteria’s exposure  to the antibiotics

and therefore their opportunity  to develop resistance.

Many bacteria that are common in animals,  like salmonella, can also infect humans,

and drug-resistant versions can pass  to us through the food chain

and spread through international trade  and travel networks.

nature offers the most promising  new compounds.

Organisms like other microbes and fungi  have evolved over millions of years

meaning they often contain  antibiotic compounds

to give them a survival advantage  over certain bacteria.

We can also package antibiotics  with molecules that inhibit resistance.

One way bacteria develop resistance  is through proteins of their own

By packaging the antibiotic with molecules that block the degraders,

Phages, viruses that attack bacteria  but don’t affect humans,

are one promising new avenue  to combat bacterial infections.

Developing vaccines for common infections, meanwhile,

can help prevent disease  in the first place.

The biggest challenge to all  these approaches is funding,

which is woefully inadequate  across the globe.

Antibiotics are so unprofitable  that many large pharmaceutical companies

Meanwhile, smaller companies  that successfully bring new antibiotics

to market often still go bankrupt,  like the American start up Achaogen.

New therapeutic techniques  like phages and vaccines

face the same fundamental problem  as traditional antibiotics:

if they’re working well,  they’re used just once,

And to successfully counteract resistance  in the long term,

we’ll need to use  new antibiotics sparingly—

lowering the profits  for their creators even further.

One possible solution is to shift profits  away from the volume of antibiotics sold.

For example, the United Kingdom  is testing a model

where healthcare providers  purchase antibiotic subscriptions.

While governments are looking for ways  to incentivize antibiotic development,

these programs are still  in the early stages.

Countries around the world  will need to do much more—

but with enough investment in antibiotic development