Anthrax stands apart in the rogue's gallery of bioterror diseases: the bacterial spores that cause it are relatively easy to acquire, mass-produce, and disseminate. They are extraordinarily lethal when inhaled, and antibiotic-resistant strains are easy to make. Moreover, as the five mail-attack deaths grimly demonstrated in 2001, modern medicine is powerless against late-stage anthrax, in which bacterial toxins cause deadly blood poisoning and organ damage.

"Biological weapons are the biggest national security threat facing the nation," says Tara O'Toole, director of the Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies at Johns Hopkins University. Anthrax, she adds, is "a much more serious threat than smallpox. I think it's much easier to imagine terrorists getting hold of the bug, the technology, and disseminating anthrax than doing all this with smallpox."

But against these realities, significant progress is afoot. A host of rapidly emerging approaches promises to save lives in future anthrax attacks, whether on the battlefield or on the home front. New treatments that kill the bacterium-Bacillus anthracis-and deactivate the deadly toxins it produces should become available within the next year or two. And better vaccines are on the way to replace the 18-month-long vaccination regimen that is already standard for hundreds of thousands of military personnel.

The first mission: combating antibiotic resistance. Anacor Pharmaceuticals in Palo Alto, CA, is developing a new class of antibiotics that block an enzyme certain bacteria-including Bacillus anthracis-need to replicate their DNA. Although the difference between this approach and the way some existing antibiotics work is subtle, it is significant enough to "increase the difficulty [for terrorists] by an order of magnitude," says Anacor CEO David Perry. That's because each new line of antibiotic attack makes it less likely that the bugs will have evolved the means to escape or that rogue states or terrorists will have engineered the right type of resistance, he says. Anacor, which last year won a $21.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to develop new compounds, has already started animal tests and expects to have drugs in human trials within three years.