This was the birth of penicillin –which was developed into the first antibiotic medication by a team of researchers, including Australian Howard Florey – an antibiotic that has since saved millions of lives. Fleming’s discovery was the first of many, with major new antibiotics being discovered in 1948 (cephalosporin), 1976 (carbapenem) and 1980 (fluoroquinolones).
And then, for more than 30 years – nothing. No approved new classes of antibiotics have been discovered.
We’ve managed to invent wireless internet, the smartphone and revolutionary pain medications, but this particular area of science has come to a standstill. The average first-world citizen might not see this as a problem; after all, we have plenty of antibiotics to treat diseases, why do we need more? But for those in the know, the fact that no new classes of antibiotics have been approved is a growing concern.
The creation of the first antibiotic led to the discovery of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. In an interview shortly after winning the Nobel Prize in 1945 for discovering penicillin, Fleming said, "The thoughtless person playing with penicillin treatment is morally responsible for the death of the man who succumbs to infection with the penicillin-resistant organism."
The diseases we take for granted as being ‘cured’ are actually still killing people, and gaining strength from the very products we use to treat them. It’s an issue affecting doctors and patients globally, which is why the Community for Open Antimicrobial Drug Discovery (CO-ADD) decided to take a global approach to finding the next antibiotic.
“Since the 1930s we’ve taken antibiotics for granted because they can kill bacteria. Over time we’ve misused them and we’ve used them too much. And so now these bacteria – which are bugs – become superbugs: bugs that don’t respond to antibiotics so the infection can then progress and lead to, unfortunately, loss of limbs and loss of life.”
The CO-ADD team considered the way antibiotic compounds were discovered in the past.
“We’d assay soils in Borneo and weird fungi – these are natural products that are made in a variety of ways and they’re very, very diverse in structure,” says Professor Cooper.
“The problem is again, with that, we’ve mined all of those. All the low-hanging fruit is gone. So we thought, how can we access chemical diversity?
“Every day, mankind makes 15,000 new compounds. Every single day. There are more than 90 million compounds on the planet. If you analyse those, they’re really diverse.”
CO-ADD’s group of scientists had figured out where they needed to look, but they needed access to these compounds, and funding to test them.
The journey so far:
2013: Professor Cooper and his team develop five-year plan to battle superbugs
2014: Worldwide Antibiotic Discovery Initiative pilot program begins
February 2015: The team secures funding from Wellcome Trust and forms CO-ADD
June 2015: Queensland Minister for Health The Hon Cameron Dick officially opens CO-ADD lab
July 2015: Professor Cooper meets Professor Victor Semenov, who agrees to send CO-ADD 150,000 compounds from his Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy project in Russia
August 2015: First shipment of compounds arrives from Russia
September 2015: UQ IMB’s Centre for Superbug Solutions officially launches
February 2016: CO-ADD partners with EU’s Innovative Medicines Initiative
April 2016: CO-ADD signs agreement to screen French National Chemical Library (50,000 compounds)
April 2016: CO-ADD signs a Memorandum of Understanding to facilitate drug discovery in Africa
May 2016: CO-ADD lab receives its 100,000th compound to screen
May 2016: CO-ADD wins UK Antibiotic Guardian Award for Research
June 2016: The team wins UQ Award for Excellence in Innovation
July 2016: Wellcome Trust agrees to fund CO-ADD for another 12 months
September 2016: Paralympian and CO-ADD ambassador Chris Bond OAM shares his inspiring story of fighting a bacterial infection for World Sepsis Day
September 2016: CO-ADD ambassador Matthew Ames is nominated for Research Australia Advocacy Award. Matthew shared his inspiring story of fighting a bacterial infection
April 2017: CO-ADD and IMB Centre for Superbug Solutions hosts first Asian-Pacific conference on Solutions for Drug-Resistant infections (SDRI 2017)
November 2017: So far more than 500 researchers from 200 institutes in 45 countries have joined CO-ADD's network and submitted more than 210,000 compounds for testing
(Photo credits: iStock/ShutterWorx, iStock 4656574, iStock/Zmeel Photography, iStock/CO-ADD; Opening video credit: iStock/slavemotion)