New Antibiotic Discovery Shows Researchers How to Work Around Drug Resistance
In what is being hailed as a major breakthrough, researchers have developed a new antibiotic that can several bacteria without inducing resistance.
According to Fox News, a team of researcher from Northeastern University and University of Bonn in Germany developed the antibiotic Teixobactin which in mice studies showed it can easily clear most staph infections and even tuberculosis without inducing drug resistance in the bacteria. It works against gram-positive bacteria.
The discovery of antibiotics like penicillin, tetracycline and streptomycin during early 20th century was the greatest find in the field of antibiotics so far. In the recent years, overuse of antibiotics caused bacteria to mutate, rendering them immune to drugs. Drug resistant bacteria reportedly kill 23,000 in United States every year, The New York Times mentioned.
NYT also reported that the method used to identify teixobactin was promising as it could lead to several finds in the future. Scientists diluted soil sample which was placed on special equipment which was then placed in a box containing soil. This way, researchers could work around the problem of growing bacteria whose growth conditions could be emulated in the lab before.
The development of the antibiotic also challenges currently held notion among researchers that bacteria eventually develop resistance.
"Our impression is that nature produced a compound that evolved to be free of resistance. This challenges the dogma that we've operated under that bacteria will always develop resistance. Well, maybe not in this case," said Professor Kim Lewis of Northeastern University, in a news release.
The teixobactin works by preventing fat molecules that build cell walls in bacteria. According to Lewis, this approach of killing bacteria is unlikely to lead to drug resistance.
Following the successful testing in mice, the drug would be tested in other animals. Human testing through clinical trial is at least two years away. It could take five or six years before the drug becomes available. The drug's discovery was published in the journal Nature.
