An antibiotic built for better binding

Cresomycin—a new antibiotic drug candidate designed to bind tightly to bacterial ribosomes—appears to sidestep a common mechanism that bacteria use to gain the upper hand against antimicrobial compounds. Cresomycin was able to fight off both gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria, including multidrug-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus , Escherichia coli , and Pseudomonas aeruginosa , in both test tubes and in mice. Andrew Myers at Harvard University and Yury Polikanov at the University of Illinois Chicago led the research effort that produced cresomycin. In 2021, Myers and Polikanov reported iboxamycin , an antibiotic inspired by the drug clindamycin. Iboxamycin preserved half of clindamycin's structure but changed the other half in a way that made iboxamycin bind more tightly than clindamycin to their mutual target—the bacterial ribosome. These antibiotics "bind to the active site of the ribosome and make the ribosome incapable of doing what it's supposed to do. So it becomes impossible