Constant struggle to conquer bacteria

Dr. Ian Friedland was sitting at his Mountain View office on a rainy October afternoon when the telephone rang with some long-awaited news: The Food and Drug Administration had just approved doripenem, the powerful antibiotic he had labored over since 2004."Shortly after the drug was approved," the 50-year-old Johnson & Johnson researcher said, "we began to hear stories about it being used successfully in patients." It was the kind of outcome that pharmaceutical scientists spend their lives trying to attain. It is also the kind of story that has become frighteningly rare. Since the early 1990s, drug companies that had built their businesses on early antibiotic research have been leaving the field. As a consequence, there has been a steady decline in the number of new antibiotics approved. SOURCE OF THIS STORY