New super-antibiotic capable of wiping out potentially fatal infections

Caribbean360

With bacteria becoming progressively more resistant to existing drugs and no new type of antibiotic hitting the market for almost 30 years, experts have warned that medical treatment could soon be dragged back to the 19th century.

Britain’s Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies has outlined an apocalyptic scenario in just 20 years, in which routine procedures become deadly because relatively minor infections can’t be quelled.

Against this backdrop, the discovery of a super-antibiotic capable of wiping out infections that could have been fatal has been hailed as “a very promising development.”

The new drug, which was found in soil and has been named teixobactin, was discovered after American, British and German scientists studied bacteria from a grassy field in Maine.

Most of the antibiotics in use today originate in nature, with many bacteria and fungi naturally producing antibiotics to protect themselves and kill competitors for food and space.

Modern scientists had nevertheless largely abandoned this line of research until experts from Northeastern University in Boston devised a gadget that allowed them to grow and study the bugs in the earth.

Out of 10,000 kinds of bacteria, 25 produced substances that could potentially be used as antibiotics, and teixobactin was the most promising.

Subsequent tests on mice showed that it killed a wide range of bacteria, including the deadly C diff stomach bug and the hospital superbug MRSA, as well as germs that damage the heart – all without producing side-effects.

It also proved to be effective against TB, raising the probability that the disease could be treated by a single drug, rather than the combination currently used.

The researchers, including scientists from UK-based drug company Selcia, were especially encouraged by the fact that they couldn’t produce any bacteria that were resistant to the drug.

The scientists said that the way teixobactin works would make it difficult for bacteria to find a way of evading it, and they predicted it would take at least 30 years for resistance to develop.

Human trials are expected to start in two years, and teixobactin could be on the market by 2019.

Researcher Kim Lewis, who has co-founded a company that is developing the drug, wrote in the journal Nature that the same technique could be used to find other antibiotic-producing bugs in soil.

Gerard Wright, a Canadian expert in antibiotic resistance, wrote in an accompanying article that “in a field dominated by doom and gloom” the work “offers hope that innovation and creativity can combine to solve the antibiotics crisis.”