[mjn]

Some background, based on quick research, not personal knowledge, so please correct if anything's wrong:

This class of antibiotics, ADEP, was discovered as a naturally produced substance isolated from the bacteria Streptomyces hawaiiensis in 1985 (Streptomyces has been a fertile source of naturally occurring antibiotics). After some promising results, there was work on synthetically synthesizing it and producing "optimized" synthetic variants. ADEP4 is one of those, and was reported in a paper published in 2005. There's a short 1-page summary of that work in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 4: 957. See page 19 of this PDF, article "Peptide power": http://journals2005.pasteur.ac.ir/NR/4%2812%29.pdf

There's a lot of work trying to understand its mechanism, e.g. here's one open-access paper that also has some background: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2955292/

Here's the paper discussed in the linked article, unfortunately paywalled, but with an abstract available that's actually a good summary: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...

[Brakenshire]

> isolated from the bacteria Streptomyces hawaiiensis in 1985 ... ADEP4 is one of those, and was reported in a paper published in 2005 ... [potential trials in coming years]

Gives an idea of the sort of development timescale we're talking about. It's almost 30 years from isolation to this point. Clinical trials would take another 10-15 years. So, if all goes well, that's 40 years from the initial discovery until a doctor starts making up prescriptions.

[ChuckMcM]

Excellent summary. I look forward to when our knowledge of cell biology is so complete that there isn't any time wasted on 'trying to understand its mechanism' rather we can explain such mechanism from first principles and know with certainly not only how it works, but how to adjust it to work most effectively to our benefit.

[girvo]

It's a peptide? Neat!