7 places that scientists are searching for new drugs
Tuesday, March 22, 2016 - 05:00
in Biology & Nature
Many of the drugs we use in hospitals – antibiotics, antifungals and anti-cancer drugs, to name but a few – are produced by bacteria that live in the soil beneath our feet. Most of the antibiotics we use were discovered by scientists in the mid-20th century, but as the threat of drug resistant infections increases, the race is on to find new microbes that make new drugs. Scientists have only identified a tiny fraction of the microbes living on Earth and are looking for useful new ones in wildly different locations, known as 'bioprospecting'.