Giving Compass' Take:

• Scientists have pinpointed a molecule that accelerates the evolution of drug and antibiotic-resistant microbes. Now they’re trying to find a way to block it, The Atlantic reports.

• How can donors help fund scientists in this field? How will such discoveries affect the healthcare industry?

• Here's more on how philanthropy can impact research on antibiotic resistance. 

The British chemist Leslie Orgel reputedly once said that “evolution is cleverer than you are.” This maxim, now known as Orgel’s Second Rule, isn’t meant to imply that evolution is intelligent or conscious, but simply that it’s inventive beyond the scope of human imagination. That’s something that people who fight infectious diseases have been forced to learn again and again.

For the past 90 years, scientists have discovered hundreds of antibiotics — microbe-killing drugs that have brought many pernicious diseases to heel. But every time researchers identify a new drug, bacteria inevitably evolve to resist it within a matter of years. We thrust; they parry. Now, with the flow of new antibiotics having dried up for decades, our stalemated duel with infectious bacteria threatens to end in outright defeat. Superbugs are ascendant around the world, including those that resist all commonly used drugs.

Houra Merrikh from the University of Washington thinks she has found a way of improving our odds. She and her team have identified a bacterial “evolvability factor” — a molecule these microbes need to rapidly evolve into drug-resistant strains. If she can find a way to block this molecule, she could pave the way for a new kind of drug: an anti-evolution drug that doesn’t killmicrobes, but stops them from powering up into superbugs (or at least delays the process). “They have this way of turning evolution on,” Merrikh says. “And if they can turn it on, we can turn it off.”

Read the full article on stopping superbugs by Ed Yong at The Atlantic.