Antibiotic breakthrough could turn the tables in battle against superbugs
The powerful antimicrobial teixobactin was discovered using a new technique that could speed up the discovery of new antibiotics to tackle resistance.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/07/antibiotic-drug-resistance-teixobactin
Scientists have discovered a new class of antibiotic using a revolutionary procedure hailed as a game changer in the hunt for medicines to fight drug-resistant infections. The antibiotic, called teixobactin, kills a wide range of drug-resistant bacteria, including MRSA and bugs that cause TB and a host of other life-threatening infections.
It could become a powerful weapon in the battle against antimicrobial resistance, because it kills microbes by blocking their capacity to build their cell walls, making it extremely difficult for bacteria to evolve resistance.
“Teixobactin kills exceptionally well. It has the ability to rapidly clear infections,” said research leader Kim Lewis, director of the Antimicrobial Discovery Center at Northeastern University in Boston, US.
New Antibiotic from Soil Bacteria
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/41850/title/New-Antibiotic-from-Soil-Bacteria/
Researchers have isolated a new kind of antibiotic from a previously unknown and uncultured bacterial genus.
Many of the most widely used antibiotics have come out of the dirt. Penicillin came from Penicillium, a fungus found in soil, and vancomycin came from a bacterium found in dirt. Now, researchers from Northeastern University and NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals and their colleagues have identified a new Gram-positive bacteria-targeting antibiotic from a soil sample collected in Maine that can kill species including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Moreover, the researchers have not yet found any bacteria that are resistant to the antibiotic, called teixobactin. Their results are published today (January 7) in Nature.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature14098.html
“When we saw no resistance [to the compound], my first reaction was that we had discovered junk that would be highly toxic,” said microbiologist Kim Lewis, director of Northeastern’s Antimicrobial Discovery Center. But mice treated with teixobactin after lethal doses of either MRSA or Streptococcus pneumonia survived and showed no signs of toxicity—a pleasant surprise to Lewis and his colleagues.
That the antibiotic can kill M. tuberclosis “is a major breakthrough because it is virtually certain to be effective for the multi-resistant strains that are now all but impossible to treat,” said Richard Novick, a microbiologist at New York University Langone Medical Center who was not involved in the work.
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