Drug discovery goes cm naturel

摘要

Discovering useful drugs to treat tuberculosis is not an exercise for the faint of heart. Screening for agents that inhibit the growth of the causative mycobacterium produces very few hits, and optimizing those hits into drug-like 'lead' molecules is exceptionally difficult, owing to the bacterium's impermeable cell envelope. Even armed with a promising lead, animal models and early-stage clinical trials have little predictive value, and the long duration of therapy currently required to treat tuberculosis makes safety hurdles much higher than for most bacterial infections. So, an attractive strategy, and one that lies at the heart of a report by Lee et al. in Nature Medicine, is to repurpose an existing antibiotic class that is already known to be safe and effective in other infections, but that has poor antitubercular activity.