I agree... Medication Resistant bacteria is a problem everywhere. There's probably no money in a new antibiotic, but... Having something new to fight TB would be nice, and there's still prestige, even if you "just" brought it to market and didn't discover it.
I would think there are pharma teams in China or India, maybe even Russia that could replicate and further develop something like this, given the initial paper and PR.
My immediate thought - there probably are these teams overseas doing these things - just, our media/markets shun them.
I mean, the covid vaccinations - people are/were doing their nut about the Euro/US versions, but the Russians had their own, the Chinese had two, and I am aware that the Chinese were handing it out to other countries as part of their aid programs (the effectiveness of those vaccines, however, has been questioned, especially in comparison to the Euro/US ones, but I'm not sure if that's reality or politics, it's so damned hard to tell these days)
American salaries and research funding are way bigger. The best scientists around the world have a strong incentive to emigrate. And the ones who don't, can't do much with the scarce funds they have, compared to America.
The reality is that 95+% of drug candidates fail the trials. And a lot of them only fail during the Phase-3 where the efficacy is tested. It's likely that large companies tried it in-house and found that it's either too toxic or is ineffective in-vivo.
Looks like there are none, which is the typical result. If you worked in a drug-discovery-adjacent field, this is an utterly normal scenario:
1. University/startup company finds a promising drug candidate that works in-vitro. They make a press-release, researchers write their theses, and move on.
2. Drug companies pick that up and run small-scale tests. These tests are negative, usually because of unexpected toxicity.
Looking at the molecule in question, it's likely what happened here. It's a covalent inhibitor, meaning that it permanently binds with the protein. It's also allosteric, meaning that it binds to the target enzyme but not at the actual active site. This is a huge red flag for toxicity, because it's likely going to bind to other proteins that can have similar configurations.
3. But the underlying idea is sound, so companies keep working on alternative approaches. They are likely looking for non-covalent compounds now, or for things like "suicide inhibitors".
4. You'll see actual trials in 10-15 years after the initial press-release. Most likely for completely different compounds, targeting the same mechanism.
There was what I thought was a breakthrough in Schizophrenia diagnosis and treatment - the University of Washington held that groups of genes acting in concert were causing the disease, and, in fact, there were multiple variants of genes producing (what had always been suspected) different diseases that were bing lumped together.
For the longest time I had been trying to figure out why nobody was taking the research seriously, why there weren't diagnostic kits available that determined which variant people were actually suffering from, and using the appropriate drug regime to manage the specific condition the patient had.
Then, last year I saw a paper being discussed (some 5 - 10 years after the initial paper), and it was building on the Washington research - it appears to me now (keeping in mind that I am a layman and an outsider) that the research /had/ been taken seriously, but it's seen as a signpost on the pathway rather than the destination.
I would think there are pharma teams in China or India, maybe even Russia that could replicate and further develop something like this, given the initial paper and PR.