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Antibiotics: US discovery labelled 'game-changer' for medicine

Simon

Senior Member
Messages
3,789
Location
Monmouth, UK
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
The 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
This is pretty-impressive

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:
It targets fats which are essential for building the bacterial cell wall, and the scientists argue it would be difficult to evolve resistance.
So this antibiotic might last longer than others.

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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13,774
Excellent... I don't need to start worrying about antibiotic resistance.

Although I guess that if this is more effective than other antibiotics, maybe that will cause people problems as well?
 

Simon

Senior Member
Messages
3,789
Location
Monmouth, UK
Excellent... I don't need to start worrying about antibiotic resistance.

Although I guess that if this is more effective than other antibiotics, maybe that will cause people problems as well?
Not quite out of the woods yet so feel free to worry some more....

No human trials yet, but no reason in principle why it should be more problematic for people. Bacteria are procaryotes with very different biochemistry to us (eucaryotes) in many cases. I haven't checked but suspect the bacterial fats targeted by this antibio are different from human fats.
 
Messages
13,774
Not quite out of the woods yet so feel free to worry some more....

I've been totally ignoring the fears so far... I wondered if some part of the media stories on this may have been influenced by a desire from pharmaceutical companies to get more favourable terms.

Aren't some bacteria helpful for us - so a more effective antibiotic could lead to more side effects? (I tend to avoid reading things on stuff like this, but my stomach has only been gradually improving after a course of antibiotics a couple of years back.)
 

Simon

Senior Member
Messages
3,789
Location
Monmouth, UK
I've been totally ignoring the fears so far... I wondered if some part of the media stories on this may have been influenced by a desire from pharmaceutical companies to get more favourable terms.
Not a case of Big Bad Pharma in this case - some very serious, independent scientists have been shouting about this for a long time, for good reason. Before antibiotics, people died of all kinds of 'minor' infections and fatality rates after surgery were horrendous. People are already dying from TB in particular that would have been much more treatable in the past. If anything, there has been way too little worrying about this going on.

Aren't some bacteria helpful for us - so a more effective antibiotic could lead to more side effects? (I tend to avoid reading things on stuff like this, but my stomach has only been gradually improving after a course of antibiotics a couple of years back.)
That's a very good point! A lot of innocent bacteria might die. Which will probably cause us a lot of problems, though nothing a faecal transplant shouldn't sort out. :)
 

Bob

Senior Member
Messages
16,455
Location
England (south coast)
Aren't some bacteria helpful for us - so a more effective antibiotic could lead to more side effects? (I tend to avoid reading things on stuff like this, but my stomach has only been gradually improving after a course of antibiotics a couple of years back.)
My understanding is that side-effects can depend on the class of antibiotic rather than the effectiveness or strength of the antibiotic.
Broad spectrum antibiotics tend to kill off all of our stomach bacteria, and that can cause problems.
Whereas other antibiotics are more targeted to specific classes of bacteria, and do less damage to the gut population.
That's my very basic understanding, anyway.
I haven't read the article yet, so I don't know what category these new types of drugs would fall into.
 
Messages
13,774
Not a case of Big Bad Pharma in this case - some very serious, independent scientists have been shouting about this for a long time, for good reason. Before antibiotics, people died of all kinds of 'minor' infections and fatality rates after surgery were horrendous. People are already dying from TB in particular that would have been much more treatable in the past. If anything, there has been way too little worrying about this going on.

Using soil to grow soil bacteria might just be the breakthrough we need though!

With a lot of these things it does that when things are about to go bad suddenly you have people try new things in a useful way. It can be dangerous to rely on that with big problems, but it does often mean that reasonable predictions of trouble end up being overcome in surprising ways.

(Possibly this is just an excuse for a head in the sand approach to life... or, more positively, just not worrying about stuff one's not going to be able to help with).