A 59 Million year old drug

Shipud writes: It is no secret that we are losing the arms race against bacteria. We are overusing antibiotics in medicine and in agriculture, virtually nurturing today’s and tomorrow’s killers. Australian scientists have now found an unusual source for a new antimicrobial: the kangaroo's pouch. Kangaroos use a wide array of powerful antimicrobial proteins as part of their innate immune system. With the tammar wallaby's genome recently sequenced, scientists have found several such drug candidates, and also reconstructed an ancestral bacteria-killing protein, deemed to be 59-million years old. So maybe the answer to the increase in bacterial resistance to antibiotics lies in Kanga’s pouch. After all, she was very protective of Roo.