Earlier this month I saw several news stories about new antibiotics, some even developed with AI. Miracle medical breakthrough, or not? Why not ask infectious diseases physician and overall medtech nerd Dr Trent Yarwood?
In this episode Trent and I talk about antimicrobial resistance, the new antibiotics including premethylenomycin C lactone, nafithromycin, and a couple developed using AI, a potential cure for HIV, the problem with relying on electronic health records, and the word “moist”.
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Episode Links
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Trent Yarwood is an infectious diseases physician, based in Cairns, Australia.
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Drug-resistant infection, digital health, random geekery and rants. Future Wise. "Ninja old guy". Doesn't pity the fool. Personal opinions.
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The World AMR Awareness Week (WAAW) is a global campaign to raise awareness and increase understanding of AMR and to promote global action to tackle the emergence and spread of drug-resistant pathogens. As one of WHO’s official health campaigns, WAAW is mandated by the World Health Assembly and is commemorated annually from 18 to 24 November.
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Antimicrobial resistance (AMR or AR) occurs when microbes evolve mechanisms that protect them from antimicrobials, which are drugs used to treat infections.
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Brendan Scott Crabb (born 13 September 1966) is an Australian microbiologist, research scientist and director and chief executive officer of the Burnet Institute, based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
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[29 October 2025] Chemists from the University of Warwick and Monash University have discovered a promising new antibiotic that shows activity against drug-resistant bacterial pathogens, including MRSA and VRE.
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[30 October 2025] The compound, pre-methylenomycin C lactone, was discovered by a team from Warwick University in the UK and Monash University in Australia. While it's never been spotted before, it comes from a type of bacteria that scientists have studied for decades.
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[29 October 2025] Warwick University scientists are among those to have discovered a powerful new antibiotic with the potential to fight drug-resistant superbugs like MRSA.
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[4 November 2025] Huey Lewis and the News sang about wanting a new drug. Some 40 years later, their wish is Brad's command in his 3 Brilliant Minutes.
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Premethylenomycin C lactone is a natural product with potent antibiotic activity, effective in vitro against drug-resistant bacteria such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE).
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Dengue fever is a mosquito-borne disease caused by dengue virus, prevalent in tropical and subtropical areas.
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The Bromeliaceae (the bromeliads) are a family of monocot flowering plants of about 80 genera and 3700 known species, native mainly to the tropical Americas, with several species found in the American subtropics and one in tropical west Africa, Pitcairnia feliciana... The family includes both epiphytes, such as Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides), and terrestrial species, such as the pineapple (Ananas comosus).
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[19 October 2025] Union Minister Singh said that the antibiotic is the first molecule entirely conceptualised, developed and clinically validated in India.
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[20 August 2025] This is a potentially exciting development, but it’s important to note there are several hurdles to overcome before we might see these antibiotics used in the real world. And if this eventuates, it’s likely to be some years away.
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[19 October 2023] Because diagnostic photos, like those shown to the AI during its training, contain a ruler for scale, the AI identified rulers as a defining characteristic of malignant skin lesions
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[28 October 2022] Many studies have shown that AI systems are susceptible to the presence of confounding factors, negatively impacting their classification performance... Specifically, a study showed that the AI algorithm appeared more likely to interpret images with rulers as malignant.
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[25 August 2016] Oxford University Press said "no", "Brexit" and "British", joined moist as the UK's four most-despised words.
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[24 November 2025] For a second year running (and only the fourth time in history), the public have aligned with the Committee’s choice by selecting AI slop to be crowned People’s Choice Word of the Year 2025!
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A heuristic or heuristic technique (problem solving, mental shortcut, rule of thumb) is any approach to problem solving that employs a pragmatic method that is not fully optimized, perfected, or rationalized, but is nevertheless "good enough" as an approximation or attribute substitution.
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Melioidosis is an infectious disease caused by a gram-negative bacterium called Burkholderia pseudomallei. Most people exposed to B. pseudomallei experience no symptoms, but complications can range from fever and skin changes to pneumonia, abscesses, and septic shock, which can be fatal.
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Scientists at the University of Amsterdam say they’ve removed HIV from infected cells and their method may one day be able to cure patients of HIV. They used CRISPR, a Nobel prize-winning gene-editing technology. It acts like microscopic scissors, cutting DNA at the molecular level so that ‘bad’ bits can be removed.
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[18 October 2025] The implications of gene editing are huge. Almost any inherited disease could in theory be corrected and therefore not passed on. Many other illnesses – chronic, acute or infectious – might one day be combatted with precisely targeted therapies. Immune cells to fight cancer may be precisely programmed.
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[23 October 2025] The ‘second Berlin patient’ received a stem cell transplant in late 2015 that cured the acute myeloid leukaemia he was suffering from. It also appears to have cured his HIV infection, as he has now been off antiretroviral therapy (ART) for seven years without his HIV reappearing. Researchers have found no DNA in his cells capable of giving rise to new virus, and his antibody response to HIV is fading, indicating there’s no virus for the immune system to respond to.
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[14 November 2025] To prevent this kind of mind-meddling, several nations and states have already passed neural privacy laws.
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[18 February 2022] Hundreds of people who had retinal implants to improve their sight face an uncertain future as the technology they rely on is now obsolete. Second Sight stopped making its Argus II bionic eyes several years ago to focus on a brain implant instead.
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By extracting and conveying key visual information about the world, the quality of life of bionic eye users can be improved. The project aims to restore functional vision for the blind by developing a bionic retinal prosthesis system that delivers visual information to the brain.
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