A retrospective on the failures and successes of antibacterial drug discovery.

Antibacterial drug discovery has been notably unproductive in the past 20 years. A shift in the key players from large pharmaceutical companies to small biotechnology companies has been accompanied by high hopes for improvement in this field, but has, as yet, yielded little. This retrospective provides a brief review of antibacterial research and highlights the underlying obstacles to the discovery of novel antibacterial agents to offer an overview of the current state of the art.