Antibiotic resistance makes our medicine useless against common bacterial infections. This is a dangerous situation, which leads to increased doses of common antibiotics. Scientists are looking for new medicine and even ways for introducing genetic mutations to bacteria to reduce their resistance. But an international team of researchers have a different alternative solution – existing frontline antibiotics may work again against the deadly bacteria that cause pneumonia.
Antibiotic resistance is a good example of evolution. Bacteria are getting used to antibiotics and are developing ways to become immune to them. This means that dangerous bacterial infections need to be treated with stronger and stronger medicine or higher doses, which lead to more severe side effects. Furthermore, many infections simply do not respond to antibiotics anymore and treatment options become severely limited.
But maybe there is a way to hit bacteria with something that would remove that resistance first so that the current antibiotics would work again? That is what scientists have now discovered. A molecule called PBT2, originally developed as a potential treatment for disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases, can break down bacteria’s defences against common antibiotics.
In mice models scientists managed to restore the effectiveness of ampicillin against bacterial pneumonia caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae. PBT2 essentially presents a big amount of zinc to the bacteria, which causes enough stress to it to make antibiotics effective again. This is very important, because antibiotic therapy is still the main treatment against bacterial pneumonia. Christopher McDevitt, one of the authors of the study, said: “We knew from earlier research that the immune system uses zinc as an innate antimicrobial to fight off infection. So, we developed our therapeutic approach with PBT2 to use the body’s antimicrobial zinc to break antibiotic resistance in the invading bacteria”.
This is a huge win for science in the face of a massive health crisis. The World Health Organisation predicts that by 2050 antibiotic resistant infections will cause more deaths than cancers and cardiac disease. There is a limit to how strong antibiotics can become, but there is virtually no limit how resistant bacteria can evolve to be. Therefore, if we want to avoid 10 million yearly deaths associated with antibiotic resistance by 2050, we need to make other treatment options work again.
Of course, only initial testing with animal models has been completed. But since PBT2 molecule was created to be used in humans it is likely to be tested fairly quickly. Although a breakthrough treatment is still probably years away.
Source: University of Adelaide
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