New antibiotic structures from fermentations

Abstract

Importance of the field: Fermentation-derived natural products have been a traditional source of antibiotics and antibiotic leads. Most of these discoveries were made about 50 years ago and continue to serve as leads for new antibiotics even today; however, their value as leads for new antibiotics is slowly fading away. In the last decade two novel classes of antibiotics were approved for clinical practice. One of them, daptomycin, is a natural product.

Areas covered in this review: This article provides a survey of patent literature, with supporting data from scientific literature wherever available, for antibiotics discovered during 2005 – 2009 from fermentations.

What the reader will gain: Readers will gain an overview of the 44 new antibiotic structures reported from 16 organizations in the last 5 years. The most significant discoveries include platensimycin, platencin, amycolamicin and a number of thiazolyl peptides.

Take home message: Natural products continue to play significant role in the discovery of new antibiotics and clearly a renewed interest in the natural products discovery is warranted to discover novel antibiotics to fight drug resistant bacteria.

Keywords::

• antibiotics
• fermentation
• natural products
• patents

Acknowledgement

The authors are indebted to their colleague L Miesel for valuable discussions and careful reading of the manuscript.

Notes

This box summarizes key points contained in the article.