antibiotics

To Fight Growing Threat From Germs, Scientists Try Old-Fashioned Killer

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Bacteriophages, little-used for decades in the U.S. and much of Europe, are gaining new attention because of resistance to antibiotics

 

NANTES, France—A hospital nurse soaked a bandage in a colorless liquid containing viruses drawn from a toxic sewer in Paris, a well in Mali and a filthy river in India. Then she daubed it gently on an elderly woman’s severely burned back.

“It’s healing,” said Ronan Le Floch, the doctor overseeing the burned woman’s care. The painful wound’s greenish tinge, the telltale sign of a potentially deadly bacterial infection, had vanished.

The liquid treatment was a cocktail of about one billion viruses called bacteriophages, which are the natural-born killers of bacteria. Little known among doctors in the West, phages have been part of the antibacteria arsenal in countries of the former Soviet Union for decades.

Doctors in the U.S. and much of Europe stopped using phages to fight bacteria when penicillin and other antibiotics were introduced in the 1940s. Now, though, Western scientists are turning back to this Stalin-era cure to help curb the dramatic growth of bacterial resistance to antibiotics.

 

Link to full article on WSJ

Gene that makes bacteria immune to last-resort antibiotic can spread

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A newly identified gene that renders bacteria resistant to polymyxin antibiotics—drugs often used as the last line of defense against infections—has the potential to be shared between different types of bacteria. The finding raises concern that the transferable gene could make its way into infectious bacteria that are already highly resistant to drugs, thereby creating strains of bacteria immune to every drug in doctors’ arsenal.

The gene, dubbed mcr-1, exists on a tiny, circular piece of DNA called a plasmid. These genetic elements, common among bacteria, are mobile; bacteria can make copies of them and share them with whatever bacteria happens to be nearby. Though scientists have previously discovered genes for polymyxin resistance, those genes were embedded in bacterial genomes, thus were not likely to easily spread.

 

Link to article on ArsTechnica

Single course of antibiotics can mess up the gut microbiome for a year

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In a battle against an infection, antibiotics can bring victory over enemy germs. Yet that war-winning aid can come with significant collateral damage; microbial allies and innocents are killed off, too. Such casualties may be unavoidable in some cases, but a lot of people take antibiotics when they’re not necessary or appropriate. And the toll of antibiotics on a healthy microbiome can, in some places, be serious, a new study suggests.

In two randomized, placebo-controlled trials of healthy people, a single course of oral antibiotics altered the composition and diversity of the gut microbiome for months, and in some cases up to a year. Such shifts could clear the way for pathogens, including the deadly Clostridium difficile. Those community changes can also alter microbiome activities, including interacting with the immune system and helping with digestion. Overall, the data, published Tuesday in the journal mBio, suggests that antibiotics may have more side effects than previously thought—at least in the gut.

 

Link to full article at Ars Technica

Riboswitch Flip Kills Bacteria

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Scientists discover a novel antibacterial molecule that targets a vital RNA regulatory element.

Researchers at the pharmaceutical company Merck have identified a new bacteria-killing compound with an unusual target—an RNA regulatory structure called a riboswitch. The team used its drug, described in Nature today (September 30), to successfully reduce an experimental bacterial infection in mice, suggesting that the molecule could lead to the creation of a new antibiotic. Moreover, the results indicate that riboswitches—and other RNA elements—might be hitherto unappreciated targets for antibiotics and other drugs.

“Finding an antibiotic with a new target . . . has always been one of the holy grails of antibiotics discovery,” said RNA biochemist Thomas Hermann of the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the work. “It looks like that’s what the Merck group has now accomplished.”

 

Link to full article at TheScientist

The story of how cephalothin to treat typhoid was developed

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Allergic to penicillin? Then you could be shot full of something that came out of a Sardinian sewer. Here’s the backstory of the important medicine that we found floating around in our own feces.

Typhoid fever is a life-threatening sickness. Although it’s rare in areas with good drinking water purification systems, worldwide it claims 200,000 lives every year. Even when scientists found out that the fever was the result of a bacterial infection, usually picked up through contact with sewage already containing the bacteria, direct treatments were hard to come by, and there was little they could do to purify water supplies for entire regions.

This is why Giuseppe Brotzu, an Italian professor of hygiene, was so surprised that the people in one particular area suffered a very low rate of typhoid casualties during a 1948 epidemic.

Read full article at io9

Maple Syrup: New Way to Fight Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria?

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Concentrated extracts of maple syrup combined with antibiotics reduced the growth of four common bacterial strains

 

Maple syrup may help fight disease-causing bacteria, including antibiotic-resistant strains that often grow in health-care settings, says a study published online in Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

Concentrated extracts of maple syrup combined with antibiotics significantly reduced the growth of four common bacterial strains and bacterial communities called biofilms, the study found.

Bacterial biofilms accumulate on medical surfaces and devices, such as catheters and artificial joints, and are responsible for many antibiotic-resistant hospital infections, research has shown.

 

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WHO-Worldwide country situation analysis: antimicrobial resistance

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WHO releases report on antimicrobial resistance plans.

Antimicrobial resistance has been detected in all parts of the world; it is one of the greatest
challenges to global public health today, and the problem is increasing. Although antimicrobial
resistance is a natural phenomenon, it is being propagated by misuse of antimicrobial
medicines, inadequate or inexistent programmes for infection prevention and control (IPC),
poor-quality medicines, weak laboratory capacity, inadequate surveillance and insufficient
regulation of the use of antimicrobial medicines.
A strong, collaborative approach will be required to combat antimicrobial resistance, involving
countries in all regions and actors in many sectors. Over a 2-year period, from 2013 to
2014, WHO undertook an initial “country situation analysis” in order to determine the extent
to which effective practices and structures to address antimicrobial resistance were already
in place and where gaps remained. The survey was conducted in countries in each of the six
WHO regions.

PDF here

 

Antibiotics: US discovery labelled ‘game-changer’ for medicine

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The decades-long drought in antibiotic discovery could be over after a breakthrough by US scientists.

Their novel method for growing bacteria has yielded 25 new antibiotics, with one deemed “very promising”.

The last new class of antibiotics to make it to clinic was discovered nearly three decades ago.

The study, in the journal Nature, has been described as a “game-changer” and experts believe the antibiotic haul is just the “tip of the iceberg”.

The heyday of antibiotic discovery was in the 1950s and 1960s, but nothing found since 1987 has made it into doctor’s hands.

Since then microbes have become incredibly resistant. Extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis ignores nearly everything medicine can throw at it.

 

Full Story

 

White House orders plan for antibiotic resistance

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Signaling the seriousness of the threat posed by antibiotic-resistant germs, President Barack Obama on Thursday ordered the government to create a national plan to fight them by early 2015.

“This is an urgent health threat and a threat to our economic stability as well,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as he joined two of Obama’s scientific advisers to announce the steps.

Already the world is facing a situation where once-treatable germs can kill. Repeated exposure to antibiotics can lead germs to become resistant to the drug so that it is no longer effective in treating a particular illness.

 

Read full article at PartRecord.com

Novel approach mimicks natural evolution with ‘promiscuous reactions’ to improve the diversity of drugs

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A revolutionary new scientific method developed at the University of Leeds will improve the diversity of ‘biologically active molecules’, such as antibiotics and anti-cancer agents.

The researchers, who report their findings online in the journal Nature Chemistry, took their inspiration from evolution in nature. The research may uncover new pharmaceutical drugs that traditional methods would never have found.

“Nature produces some amazing structures with really interesting biological activity, but the plant or animal did not design them. Instead the organisms gradually evolved both the chemical structures and the methods to produce them over millennia because they were of benefit. We wanted to capture the essence of this in our approach to discovering new drugs,” said George Karageorgis, a PhD student from the School of Chemistry and the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology at the University of Leeds, and first author of the study.

The traditional method for discovering new drugs involves preparing new biologically active molecules by adjusting the chemical structure of an existing one slightly and analysing the results. This trial and error method is both time consuming and limits the variety of new types of drugs that are developed.

“There is a known problem with limited diversity in drug discovery. It’s like a baker always going to the same storage cupboard and using the same ingredients, yet hoping to create something that tastes different,” said Dr Stuart Warriner from the School of Chemistry and the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology at the University of Leeds, a co-author of the research paper.

Read full story at MNT