MRSA

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.

 

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Scientists ‘find alternative to antibiotics which could combat superbugs like MRSA’

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Scientists believe they have found an alternative to antibiotics which could be used to combat superbugs such as MRSA.

A small test study suggested the new drug, an enzyme that solely targets the bacteria in MRSA, was effective against the infection with scientists claiming the likelihood of the bug becoming resistant was “very limited”.

Dutch biotech firm Micreos presented the findings at the EuroSciCon meeting, called Antibiotics Alternatives for the New Millenium, in London yesterday.

Micreos CEO Mark Offerhaus hailed it as a “new era in the fight against antibiotic resistant bacteria” and said “millions of people stand to benefit”.

 

 

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Overcoming Resistance In the face of bacterial threats that can evade modern medicines

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In the face of bacterial threats that can evade modern medicines, researchers are trying every trick in the book to develop new, effective antibiotics.

Although researchers and drug developers have been sounding warnings for years about bacteria out-evolving medicine’s arsenal of antibiotics, the crisis is coming to a head. In the United States alone, some 23,000 people are killed each year by infections caused by drug-resistant bacteria, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2013 Threat Report. Many more patients die of other conditions complicated by infection with resistant pathogens. Such maladies cost the health-care system more than $20 billion annually, in part because patients suffering from drug-resistant infections require more than 8 million additional hospital days.

 

Read full article on The Scientist