The multi-drug regimen is a major problem for several reasons. It requires TB patients to manage taking four drugs exactly as prescribed over six to nine months. If patients don’t take the full course of the medicines, the TB bacteria may develop resistance to the drugs and become even more difficult to treat. To reduce that risk, many countries require that patients go to a clinic so a healthcare professional can watch them take the medication and ensure they are complying with their drug-treatment regimen. This is both expensive and time consuming. Gokhale said that a single drug that targets multiple pathways could save time and money by eliminating the need to take so many drugs over such a long period of time.

To create their new compound, Gokhale and his colleagues exploited an evolutionary quirk in the way Mycobacterium tuberculosis builds the lipid layer that coats its surface. Unlike other organisms, M. tuberculosis displays a suite of complex lipids on its outer membrane. Some scientists have suggested that these long lipid molecules contribute to the bacteria’s ability to maintain long-term infections by confusing the host’s immune system.

The Pyrenean ibex, a form of wild mountain goat, was officially declared extinct in 2000 when the last-known animal of its kind was found dead in northern Spain. Shortly before its death, scientists preserved skin samples of the goat, a subspecies of the Spanish ibex that live in mountain ranges across the country, in liquid nitrogen.

Using DNA taken from these skin samples, the scientists were able to replace the genetic material in eggs from domestic goats, to clone a female Pyrenean ibex, or bucardo as they are known. It is the first time an extinct animal has been cloned.

Sadly, the newborn ibex kid died shortly after birth due to physical defects in its lungs. Other cloned animals, including sheep, have been born with similar lung defects. But the breakthrough has raised hopes that it will be possible to save endangered and newly extinct species by resurrecting them from frozen tissue.

It has also increased the possibility that it will one day be possible to reproduce long-dead species such as woolly mammoths and even dinosaurs.