Over the past 12 years, Novobiotic Pharmaceuticals has cultivated 50,000 strains of microorganism no one else could. And they’ve discovered 25 new antibiotics. One made headlines a year ago because it kills bugs in a new way,  and one to which it is much more difficult for bacteria to develop resistance.

These 25 antibiotics will not necessarily all be useful; many look to be toxic to our cells as well as to bacteria. But the point is the speed of the approach. The firm found a new candidate antibiotic for every 2000 microbe strains it grew. That is orders of magnitude better than the pharmaceutical industry managed before it abandoned this method of discovering antibiotics.

Added to this, two of the 25 molecules appear to work against tuberculosis. As a result, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are now funding their development into drugs. And antibiotics that are toxic to human cells often go on to be useful anticancer drugs, so they are not a lost cause.

This effort is in response to one of the greatest threats to human health ever: the super-bug, resistant to all known anti-biotics, and a strain, probably originating in Chins, that is now being found in Europe and elsewhere. Colisten, a form of anti-biotic used in meat production,  is also losing its resistance to the super-bug, and if there is no replacement, it will have a devastating effect on beef cattle especially.