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Another major university study funded by the NIH proves that the borrelia bacterium survives antibiotic treatment, and propose two treatments to combat it.
How many studies will be needed for the CDC to change their flawed guidelines?Researchers’ discovery may explain difficulty in treating Lyme disease
Northeastern University researchers have found that the bacterium that causes Lyme disease forms dormant persister cells, which are known to evade antibiotics. This significant finding, they said, could help explain why it’s so difficult to treat the infection in some patients.
“It hasn’t been entirely clear why it’s difficult to treat the pathogen with antibiotics since there has been no resistance reported for the causative agent of the disease,” explained University Distinguished Professor Kim Lewis, who led the Northeastern research team.
In other chronic infections, Lewis’ lab has tracked the resistance to antibiotic therapy to the presence of persister cells—which are drug-tolerant, dormant variants of regular cells. These persister cells are exactly what they’ve identified here in Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease.
The researchers have also reported two approaches—one of them quite promising—to eradicate Lyme disease, as well as potentially other nasty infections.
Lewis and his colleagues presented their findings in a paper published online last week in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. He co-authored the paper with Northeastern doctoral students Bijaya Sharma and Autumn Brown, both PhD’16; recent graduate Nicole Matluck, S’15, who received her Bachelor of Science in Behavioral Neuroscience; and Linden T. Hu, a professor of molecular biology and microbiology at Tufts University.
The research was supported by grants from the Lyme Research Alliance and the National Institutes of Health. (...)
In addition to identifying the presence of these persister cells, Lewis’ team also presented two methods for wiping out the infection—both of which were successful in lab tests. One involved an anti-cancer agent called Mitomycin C, which completely eradicated all cultures of the bacterium in one fell swoop. However, Lewis stressed that, given Mitomycin C’s toxicity, it isn’t a recommended option for treating Lyme disease, though his team’s findings are useful to helping to better understand the disease.
The second approach, which Lewis noted is much more practical, involved pulse-dosing an antibiotic to eliminate persisters. The researchers introduced the antibiotic a first time, which killed the growing cells but not the dormant persisters. But once the antibiotic washed away, the persisters woke up, and before they had time to restore their population the researchers hit them with the antibiotic again. Four rounds of antibiotic treatments completely eradicated the persisters in a test tube.
“This is the first time, we think, that pulse-dosing has been published as a method for eradicating the population of a pathogen with antibiotics that don’t kill dormant cells,” Lewis said. “The trick to doing this is to allow the dormant cells to wake up.”
(...)
http://www.northeastern.edu/news/20...-explain-difficulty-in-treating-lyme-disease/