This Gordon Conference will address a critical issue regarding the availability of new antibacterial targets and developing these new targets through to useful antimicrobial agents. We will address this issue by assembling representatives of industry, academia, regulatory agencies, NIAID and, hopefully, political representatives.

Traditionally, antibiotics have been thought to be amongst the easiest drugs to identify. Because they generally are targeted at sites with little overlap with human targets, they have been felt to be true “miracle drugs”, providing protection from some of man’s oldest maladies while being relatively non-toxic.

Why, then, is there a problem? On one side, widespread misuse of antimicrobials coupled with a lack of understanding regarding the linkage between drug exposure and resistance emergence has resulted in the loss of our most potent anti-infective agents, both in the community and in the Intensive Care Unit. On the other side, extensive screening and development efforts by BigPharma have not resulted in the anticipated payoff of new agents. Biotech Pharma has developed some new targets/agents or resurrected old ones. However, the inability of Biotech Pharma to control its own financial fate has resulted in a number of ill-considered decisions about the time lines of development and submission of less than optimal data packages to regulatory agencies.

None of these issues are new. They have been identified as problems over the last several years. What we hope for from this Gordon Conference is to bring together a sufficient pool of talented individuals from multiple backgrounds to take this identification of problems to the next level: the initiation of dialogue to point towards solutions. This may require changes in the regulatory setting as well as new science. Changes in the regulatory setting (combination chemotherapy, allowing two new drugs at the same time, etc) will almost certainly require intervention from the political side. If we can start the way forward, we will perform a great service to our patients who wait patiently for the advent of new, life-saving antimicrobials of any type (traditional small molecule, recombinant therapy, virulence modulator, etc).