The use of antibiotics has enabled us to cure many diseases. However, current excessive usage, in particular the continued prescription of antibiotics to treat viral diseases to promote faster growth of animals in food production, increases the resistance of pathogenic microbes, resulting in a loss of efficacy of antibiotics. This poses an urgent threat to global public health and increases the cost of healthcare. WHO has declared antibiotic resistance as global health care crisis and has warned that if immediate action is not taken we shall soon be pushed back to pre-antibiotic era where simple infections and operations could be life-threatening.

The task of finding new antibiotics is both labor and resource intensive. Most antibiotics known to us today have been developed out of natural extracts – soil, plants, insects, deep-sea beds and volcanoes, all of which host useful microbes with antibiotic potential. What if the world's next antibiotic was in our own backyard? Most known antibiotics are developed from natural extracts, so a new antibiotic could potentially be found anywhere.