Dear All (wonkish … but worth it … get ready to follow the links!), Greetings in the new year! As a marvelous way to end the last year, the US FDA announced on 12 Dec 2025 its approval of two new oral therapies for gonorrhea, thus addressing the priority pathogen lists of both WHO (High

Dear All, In a paper that is clearly a labor of love (1,032 references!), Mark Butler and Robert Capon have summarized the history of 217 natural product-inspired antibiotics across 16 classes from penicillin to fidaxomicin! Here are the links you need: Butler MS, Capon RJ. Natural product inspired antibiotics approved for human use – 1943

Dear All, Happy New Year! As a great start for January, Team CARB-X have announced (i) that they will have two funding calls during 2026 (April and then Q4) and (ii) that a theme focused on finding new chemical scaffolds will be part of both calls. Applications to these target-based therapeutics funding calls will require defined chemistry

Dear All (and with thanks to Betsy Trainor for co-authoring), The idea of the STEDI values of an antibiotic (its fire extinguisher-like values) comes up often. As a reminder, the STEDI values are Spectrum, Transmission, Enablement, Diversity, and Insurance. As a good example, consider Enablement: knowing that an antibiotic exists as a backup makes safe

Dear All (and with thanks to Stephan Harbarth for co-authoring this newsletter), A new review by Ursula Theuretzbacher and colleagues from GARDP provides an opportunity to (i) discuss the preclinical antibacterial pipeline (the new paper), (ii) remind you of a recent review of the Gram-negative clinical pipeline, and (iii) share an excellent Industry-level perspective on