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Researchers have found a way to modify vancomycin — a last-ditch antibacterial — and "supercharge" it to create vancapticins which are far more effective against antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections:
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria – superbugs – cause 700,000 deaths worldwide each year, and a UK government review has predicted this could rise to 10 million by 2050.
[University of Queensland's] Dr Blaskovich said the old drug, vancomycin, was still widely used to treat extremely dangerous bacterial infections, but bacteria were becoming increasingly resistant to it.
“The rise of vancomycin-resistant bacteria, and the number of patients dying from resistant infections that cannot be successfully treated, stimulated our team to look at ways to revitalise old antibiotics,” Dr Blaskovich said.
“We did this by modifying vancomycin’s membrane-binding properties to selectively bind to bacterial membranes rather than those of human cells, creating a series of supercharged vancomycin derivatives called vancapticins.”
The rebooted vancomycin has the potential to treat methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant Enterococci (VRE).
[...] “Drug development is normally focused on improving binding to a biological target, and rarely focuses on assessing membrane-binding properties.
“This approach worked with the vancapticins, and the question now is whether it can be used to revitalise other antibiotics that have lost effectiveness against resistant bacteria.
“Given the alarming rise of multi-drug resistant bacteria and the length of time it takes to develop a new antibiotic, we need to look at any solution that could fix the antibiotic drug discovery pipeline now,” Professor Cooper said.
Having been treated for an infection with vancomycin, I can attest it's a scary feeling when, after three days' treatment, the infection commences to spread! Fortunately, an increased dose turned the tide, but it was touch-and-go for a while. Sadly, is this just another step in the cat-and-mouse battle of increasing bacterial resistance?
Journal Reference:
- Mark A. T. Blaskovich, et. al. Protein-inspired antibiotics active against vancomycin- and daptomycin-resistant bacteria. Nature Communications, 2018; 9 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-02123-w
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pdfernhout on Saturday January 06 2018, @10:26PM
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL9910/S00096.htm [scoop.co.nz]
"I watched BBC's Horizon programme The Virus the Cures on Prime TV on 11 October. The programme revealed that we - ie humankind - had discovered a superior cure (to antibiotics) for bacterial infections around the same time that penicillin was being discovered. The research programme on bacteriophages (phages for short) began in Stalin's Georgia in the 1930s. To this day, our knowledge of each of the many thousands of phage viruses remains concentrated in a now rundown laboratory in Tbilisi, Georgia. The arrival of capitalism in the Caucuses threatens a repository of knowledge, built up over 50 years, that could prevent the superbug pandemic that threatens us all next century.
Phages are viruses that live in sewage. Each bacterium has a phage that represents its antidote. As new bacteria strains evolve, new phages evolve in tandem. If there is one thing faster than bacterial evolution, it is virus evolution. Phage therapy is a bit like homeopathy. A person with a bacterial infection must have it accurately diagnosed. Once diagnosed, the physician goes to a phial containing the correct phage, prepares a medicine (phages multiply quickly when allowed to) and administers it. The patient is soon cured, without side effects. If there is a new bacterium, its phage antidote is found eventually. The phage research programme involved a lot of patience: searching, identifying, classifying. Nothing was costly in the capitalist sense. Rather, it was very labour intensive work, performed in Georgia by a dedicated group of publicly-minded scientists. ...
While there are some genuine reasons why phage treatments of bacterial diseases were overlooked in the 1930s and 1940s, the failure to develop a western research program into bacteriophage treatment in the 1980s and 1990s represents an inexcusable failure of western capitalism. By the 1980s, there could be no denial that antibiotic resistance was going to be a major problem in (if not before) the twenty-first century. Yet, we just didn't want to know about what will probably turn out to be the most important medical breakthrough in the twentieth century; a breakthrough made in communist Georgia, in Stalin's Soviet Union.
It is embarrassing when western science is out-trumped, especially by the "communists". Usually, when out-trumped, we don't tell anyone. That's what happened here. Not only did we not have the nous to start a western programme in bacteriophage research; we looked the other way when the files of phials threatened to be destroyed following the breakup of the Soviet Union, and during the little reported civil war that engulfed Georgia a few years ago. So much for the knowledge economies of the west. How can such valuable knowledge be so cheap?
It's not too late for western medicine to enter the post-antibiotic bacteriophage era. Our grandchildren will hardly thank us if we persevere with our corporate-profit-motivated conservatism.
The Soviets were able, eventually, to admit that they were wrong to follow Lysenko. Will we in the west be equally able to admit that we were wrong to put all our medical eggs into the one antibiotic basket, in the process ignoring the most basic tenets of the theory of evolution?"
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.