I think we'll be seeing more research like this in the future, where we develop drugs by mimicking nature instead of starting from scratch in the lab. Nature has had a few millions of years more to build and test things.
Nature (at least in terms of natural antibiotic sources like fungi and bacteria) also has a relatively quick turnaround in terms of adaptation.
Ultimately, developing antibiotics is a cat-and-mouse game, and eventually nanotech will render it archaic, but in the mean time the more we can do to be responsive and quick to adjust, the better, and that means new antibiotics.
I do worry about this "30 year projection" and what that's based on. Is that a historical norm?
I think nanotech will bring about it's own problems.
What we should be doing is addressing the cause of antibiotic resistance in the first place, namely the overprescription of antibiotics, and their improper use in industrial farming.
The over-prescription of antibiotics isn't the cause of antibiotic resistance, it's the cause of accelerated antibiotic resistance.
Which for all practical purposes might be the same thing, if we're talking 80 years versus 30 years for propagation of resistance.
Nanotech will be a very, very arduous and slow process. "Its own problems" is putting it lightly. People will die due to nanotech approaches to anti-pathogenics, no question about it. We're talking about programmable biology, something will go wrong.
The biggest problem is what happens when we've eliminated human pathogens? What happens when we've extended the average life expectancy by 10 years - after all, many cancers are caused by pathogens. What happens to the ecosystem when herpesviridae is effectively gone? What are the side effects, the unintended consequences?
The 30 years guess is based on the history of vancomycin, which like teixobactin was isolated from a soil bacteria. They presume, based on multiple similarities and things like teixobactin producing bacteria not having innate immunity to it except for not having cell walls, that it could have a similar period of freedom from resistance development. And if their thesis and what they think they know about it is correct, it could have an even better experience.
But least awful iterated thousands of times eventually leads to either "the best" or comparable to "the best." Not always the most efficient route, but largely dependable at scale.
