32 LISTENER FEBRUARY 29 2020
by Nicky Pellegrino
HEALTH
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that were resistant to most existing
treatments. These included Klebsiella
and E coli, which are spreading rap-
idly and can cause severe and often
deadly infections that are a particular
threat in hospitals.A New Zealand scientist search-
ing for solutions is microbiologist
Siouxsie Wiles of the
University of Auck-
land. She is focused
on several of the
pathogens on
the WHO hit list,including Klebsiella and E coli. Her
team at the Bioluminescent Super-
bugs Lab spend their time trying to
kill these enemy organisms using
native fungi collected by Manaaki
Whenua Landcare Research.
“It’s really long and arduous work,”
she says. “The problem is only about
one in five drugs that make it to clini-
cal trials succeed, so we need to be
identifying hundreds of compounds
to have a chance of getting one new
drug. We’ve identified a handful at
the moment, but it’s not enough.”
Perhaps her biggest challenge has
been getting Government funding to
continue. “I don’t know why,” she
says. “Is it that the project is just not
exciting enough?”
For a time, she was reliant on
grants from the charity Cure Kids,
through its “Fight Against Superbugs”
appeal and crowdfunding campaign.
Then New Zealand Carbon Farming
provided enough money for three
years’ work.
“We’ve got two years left and we’reSorry, hate
to bug you
Antibiotic-resistant germs
are on the rise, but the
Government and big
pharma don’t seem to care.
The predictions, if we
don’t act, are dire – 10
million deaths linked toantimicrobial resistance
a year by 2050.FOOD • WINE • TECHNOLOGY • SPORT
Siouxsie Wiles and
Tedros Adhanom
Ghebreyesus.A
ntibiotic resistance is hardly news.
We’ve known for years that some
common pathogens are evolving so
the drugs we once relied on are no
longer effective against them. The
World Health Organisation (WHO)
has warned this is a global health
emergency that threatens to return us to a time
when people feared everyday infections and risked
their lives having minor surgery.
It would be good to think someone is in charge
of fixing this and that a host of amazing new
drugs is not far away. But the latest report from
the WHO is a stark reminder that this is not the
case. It has warned that of the 50 or so antibiot-
ics in the pipeline, most bring little benefit over
existing treatments and few target the most critical
resistant bacteria. Those few innovative drugs are
years away from reaching patients. And the bigger
pharmaceutical companies have stepped away from
developing antimicrobials, leaving the smaller and
medium-sized companies to fill the gap.
“Never has the threat of antimi-
crobial resistance been more
immediate and the need for
solutions more urgent,”
says Tedros Adhanom
Ghebreyesus, director-
general of the WHO.
In 2017, the organisa-
tion published a list of
priority pathogens