According to the latest reports, a brand new class of antibiotics is able to kill a resistant superbug. Here are the interesting details below.
Killing resistant superbug
A new antibiotic has been discovered that is able to bypass the defenses of a dangerous bacterial species that is resistant to most existing antibiotics. This species is called CRAB (carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii).
The newly found antibiotic can kill CRAB using a unique attack strategy that has never been seen before in antibacterial drugs. The strategy is highly targeted, and it only affects the one type of bacteria.
“The advantage of a novel class of fully synthetic antibiotic is that bacteria have never seen this,” said Kenneth Bradley, one of the drug’s developers and head of infectious diseases discovery at Roche Pharma Research and Early Development in Basel, Switzerland.
The existing shields that CRAB uses to fend off antibiotics can’t block the new drug’s attacks.
Bradley and his collaborators at Roche and Harvard University have recently published two papers in the journal Nature. These papers describe the discovery and mechanism of action of a new antibiotic called zosurabalpin. Currently, the drug is undergoing early-stage safety trials in humans.
“This is very promising in that this is a new drug class and a new drug target,” Paul Hergenrother, a professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who wasn’t involved in the research, told Live Science. “One would not expect cross-resistance with antibiotics that hit other targets.”
The CRAB bacterium has been identified as an “urgent” threat in the United States due to its widespread resistance. This microbe typically causes infections in the blood, urinary tract, lungs, and wounds, and it is especially dangerous for people with weakened immune systems or those who require catheters or ventilators in healthcare settings.
The bacterium is classified as “gram-negative,” which means it has a cell wall surrounded by a membrane. Because it is difficult to find antibiotics that can penetrate the outer membrane of these microbes and remain effective, no new antibiotic class has been developed in over 50 years.
This makes it challenging to combat CRAB infections effectively, according to Hergenrother.
The study authors aimed to help close this gap by hunting for new types of antibiotics. “Instead of making new versions of the existing antibiotic scaffolds … we wanted to start with something completely different,” Bradley said.
Check out more details about the subject in the article posted by LiveScience.
