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A new experimental antibiotic can handily knock off one of the world's most notoriously drug-resistant and deadly bacteria —in lab dishes and mice, at least. It does so with a never-before-seen method, cracking open an entirely new class of drugs that could yield more desperately needed new therapies for fighting drug-resistant infections.
The findings appeared this week in a pair of papers published in Nature, which lay out the extensive drug development work conducted by researchers at Harvard University and the Swiss-based pharmaceutical company Roche.
In an accompanying commentary, chemists Morgan Gugger and Paul Hergenrother of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign discussed the findings with optimism, noting that it has been more than 50 years since the Food and Drug Administration has approved a new class of antibiotics against the category of bacteria the drug targets: Gram-negative bacteria. This category—which includes gut pathogens such as E. coli, Salmonella, Shigella, and the bacteria that cause chlamydia, the bubonic plague, gonorrhea, whooping cough, cholera, and typhoid, to name a few—is extraordinarily challenging to kill because it's defined by having a complex membrane structure that blocks most drugs, and it's good at accumulating other drug-resistance strategies.
In this case, the new drug—dubbed zosurabalpin—fights off the Gram-negative bacterium carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii, aka CRAB. Though it may sound obscure, it's an opportunistic, invasive bacteria that often strikes hospitalized and critically ill patients, causing deadly infections worldwide. It is extensively drug-resistant, with ongoing emergence of pan-resistant strains around the world—in other words, strains that are resistant to every current antibiotic available. Mortality rates of invasive CRAB infections range from 40 to 60 percent. In 2017, the World Health Organization listed it as a priority 1: critical pathogen, for which new antibiotics are needed most urgently.
arstechnica.com
The findings appeared this week in a pair of papers published in Nature, which lay out the extensive drug development work conducted by researchers at Harvard University and the Swiss-based pharmaceutical company Roche.
In an accompanying commentary, chemists Morgan Gugger and Paul Hergenrother of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign discussed the findings with optimism, noting that it has been more than 50 years since the Food and Drug Administration has approved a new class of antibiotics against the category of bacteria the drug targets: Gram-negative bacteria. This category—which includes gut pathogens such as E. coli, Salmonella, Shigella, and the bacteria that cause chlamydia, the bubonic plague, gonorrhea, whooping cough, cholera, and typhoid, to name a few—is extraordinarily challenging to kill because it's defined by having a complex membrane structure that blocks most drugs, and it's good at accumulating other drug-resistance strategies.
In this case, the new drug—dubbed zosurabalpin—fights off the Gram-negative bacterium carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii, aka CRAB. Though it may sound obscure, it's an opportunistic, invasive bacteria that often strikes hospitalized and critically ill patients, causing deadly infections worldwide. It is extensively drug-resistant, with ongoing emergence of pan-resistant strains around the world—in other words, strains that are resistant to every current antibiotic available. Mortality rates of invasive CRAB infections range from 40 to 60 percent. In 2017, the World Health Organization listed it as a priority 1: critical pathogen, for which new antibiotics are needed most urgently.
Experimental antibiotic kills deadly superbug, opens whole new class of drugs
The relatively large molecule clogs a transport system, leading to lethal toxicity.
