Simon
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Looks very promising, both for a specific new potential 'highly-resistant' antibiotic, as well as a method of finding many more antibiotics
BBC News - Antibiotics: US discovery labelled 'game-changer' for medicine
First, the researchers focused on soil bacteria, source of most of our current antibiotics. The problem is that only around 1% of soil bugs will grow in the lab, so they came up with the brilliant solution of...
... burying bacteria (attached to a chip) in the soil, in the back yard of a researcher in Boston. Ta da! almost half of them grew.
Then they screeend the growing bacteria to see if they were producig antibiotics (a favoured weapon against other bacteria). The found 25, of which one, teixobactin, looks highly promising and has cleared an MSRA infection in mice. Human tests await, but this is exciting as there hasn't been a new antibiotic for clinics since 1987.
Even better, it looks like it will be hard for other bacteria to evade teixobactin:
Perhaps even more important is this is just the start of a hunt for antibiotics in soil bacteria, using a new technique, with potentially many more antibiotics to come.
But the article includes this warning from the BBC's science editor, James Gallagher:
BBC News - Antibiotics: US discovery labelled 'game-changer' for medicine
This is pretty-impressiveThe decades-long drought in antibiotic discovery could be over after a breakthrough by US scientists. Their novel method for growing bacteria has yielded 25 new antibiotics, with one deemed "very promising".
The last new class of antibiotics to make it to clinic was discovered nearly three decades ago. The study, in the journal Nature, has been described as a "game-changer" and experts believe the antibiotic haul is just the "tip of the iceberg"...
read in full
First, the researchers focused on soil bacteria, source of most of our current antibiotics. The problem is that only around 1% of soil bugs will grow in the lab, so they came up with the brilliant solution of...
... burying bacteria (attached to a chip) in the soil, in the back yard of a researcher in Boston. Ta da! almost half of them grew.
Then they screeend the growing bacteria to see if they were producig antibiotics (a favoured weapon against other bacteria). The found 25, of which one, teixobactin, looks highly promising and has cleared an MSRA infection in mice. Human tests await, but this is exciting as there hasn't been a new antibiotic for clinics since 1987.
Even better, it looks like it will be hard for other bacteria to evade teixobactin:
So this antibiotic might last longer than others.It targets fats which are essential for building the bacterial cell wall, and the scientists argue it would be difficult to evolve resistance.
Perhaps even more important is this is just the start of a hunt for antibiotics in soil bacteria, using a new technique, with potentially many more antibiotics to come.
But the article includes this warning from the BBC's science editor, James Gallagher:
...even if their method does mark a new era of antibiotic discovery there are big questions.
Sir Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, warned of the dangers of resistance back in his Nobel prize speech in 1945. Yet even now prescriptions in England are rising, with half deemed "inappropriate" and contributing to the problem.
But can we be trusted with new antibiotics? Or will we make the same mistakes again?
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