New antibiotic is resistant to resistance

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are a very real threat around the world. Inappropriate and indiscriminate use of antibiotics have created what the medical community calls “super-bugs,” pathogens traditional medications are no longer effective against.

Super-bugs may soon be old news, however, as researchers from Northeastern University in Boston claim they have developed a new class of antibiotics that are resistant to creating resistance.

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The new antibiotics are developed from soil microbes, microbes responsible for other “breakthrough” antibiotics like penicillin. The difficulty with soil microbes, according to researchers, is that they are very difficult to culture in a laboratory setting, which is why new antibiotics are rarely discovered. Professor Kim Lewis, lead researcher of the Northeastern University study, was able to grow soil microbes in their natural environment, and in doing so was able to identify 25 potential new antibiotics.

One of those, named teixobactin, appeared the be the most powerful, killing a number of pathogenic bacteria, including the drug-resistant super-bugs MRSA and VRE (vancomycin resistant enterococci). According to the World Health Organization (WHO), hundreds of thousands of drug-resistant infections happen around the world every year, and the majority of infections acquired while in the hospital setting are drug-rsistant MRSA.

Teixobactin was unique in the study, not only because of how effective it was against super-bugs, but because of how it combated the pathogens. The new antibiotic attacked super-bugs in a way that prevents the development of resistance: by breaking down the cell wall. This means a pathogen can mutate all it wants yet it will always be susceptible to cell wall deterioration.

“Teixobactin’s dual mode of action and binding to non-peptidic regions suggest that resistance will be very difficult to develop,” said Lewis to MNT.

Traditionally, WHO explains super-bugs develop by multiplying in mass numbers or by exchanging drug-resistant traits through the replication process. These traits can include modified receptor sites or different modes of replication, but rarely do they involve cell wall stability. At the moment, teixobactin attacks super-bugs in the one place they all have a weakness.

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Of course, experts have no way of knowing if certain pathogens can learn to adapt to teixobactin. Only through wide-spread use and human trials will the possibility of resistance be fully understood.

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