Predicting resistance evolution to guide antibiotic development.

Systematic resistance prediction framework identifies five key parameters to guide antibiotic development and reduce resistance emergence.

• Why it matters: Antibiotic resistance hampers drug discovery and threatens the effectiveness of new antibiotics, necessitating early identification of resistance risks to prevent costly failures.
• What they did: The study developed a resistance-based framework evaluating de novo resistance evolvability, fitness trade-offs, stability, cross-resistance, and gene risk across pathogens, integrating these into the development pipeline.
• The result: This approach enables proactive classification and refinement of antibiotic candidates, shifting resistance prediction from reactive to strategic, thereby improving the success and longevity of new antibiotics.