Hunting for Medicines Hidden in Plants

I love reading about plants. Three books I would recommend are:

- The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature

- Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Future

- Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime

It feels like I've read this same introduction for the last 30 years. I mean, I remember reading stuff like this around 1992 in the Sean Connery film "Medicine Man", with Connery's character searching the Amazon for a anti-cancer drug.

> One hope was that the next antibiotic breakthrough would emerge from making and testing enough of these synthetic compounds. But that effort has fallen flat: Though other medicines have been developed in the lab, no new registered classes of antibiotics have been discovered since the 1980s.

Doesn't that also speak to a failure of natural products research, which has also been trying to find "the next antibiotic breakthrough"?

Look, I'm a coder, not a pharmaceutical chemist. But even here on HN a search for "antibiotic class" (like https://hn.algolia.com/?q=antibiotic+class ) finds:

"Antibiotic resistance: 'Snot wars' study yields new class of drugs" - "A new class of antibiotics has been discovered by analysing the bacterial warfare taking place up people's noses, scientists report." - 5 years ago, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12180966 . About lugdunin. Doesn't seem to have gone anywhere.

"New class of antibiotics discovered by chemists " from 7 years ago, about oxadiazoles. Found by computer search. Doesn't seem to have gone anywhere.

"First pictures of enzyme that drives new class of antibiotics" from 2 years ago, about obafluorin, "made by a fluorescent strain of soil bacteria that forms biofilms on plant roots". Wikipedia doesn't know about it.

"A new class of antibiotics active against wide range of bacteria" from 11 months ago, since retracted (?!) - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-03074-x .

And if I do a DDG search for "new antibiotic class", I find:

"Murepavadin: a new antibiotic class in the pipeline" (2018) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29451043/ . Wikipedia describes it as "the first example of an outer membrane protein-targeting antibiotic class with a novel, nonlytic mechanism of action".

"A new antibiotic kills pathogens without detectable resistance" (2015) https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14098 . Teixobactin. Wikipedia describes it as "a peptide-like secondary metabolite of some species of bacteria, that kills some gram-positive bacteria. It appears to belong to a new class of antibiotics, and harms bacteria by binding to lipid II and lipid III ... discovered using a new method of culturing bacteria in soil, which allowed researchers to grow a previously unculturable bacterium now named Eleftheria terrae, which produces the antibiotic."

That's at least 5 new natural product leads on a new class of antibiotics, yet none made the list.

> the focus on nature waned as scientists instead built large chemical libraries filled with tens of thousands of lab-made molecules

If natural product search doesn't work, and lab-made molecules don't work, then ... is it really right to focus only on the failure of the latter?