Current Affairs
Teixobactin discovery: Scientists create first new antibiotic in 30 years - and say it could be the key to beating superbug resistance
Scientists have conducted tests that show teixobactin could provide a platform for new
treatments to combat superbugs.
A new antibiotic – the first in nearly 30 years – has been discovered by scientists who claim it appears to be as good, or even better, than many existing drugs with the potential to work against a broad range of fatal infections such as pneumonia and tuberculosis.
Laboratory tests have shown the new antibiotic, called teixobactin, can kill some bacteria as quickly as established antibiotics and can cure laboratory mice suffering from bacterial infections with no toxic side-effects.
Studies have also revealed the prototype drug works against harmful bacteria in a unique way that is highly unlikely to lead to drug-resistance – one of the biggest stumbling blocks in developing new antibiotics.
Such a development would represent a huge boost for medicine because of growing fears that the world is running out of effective antibiotics given the rapid rise of drug-resistant strains of superbugs and the spread of these diseases around the globe.
Last year David Cameron warned that medicine could be cast back to the “dark ages” when people died of relatively trivial infections, especially following routine hospital operations, because of the lack of effective antibiotics.
Professor Kim Lewis of Northeastern University in Boston – who led the research and is working with NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which owns the patents on teixobactin – said that the first clinical trials on humans could begin in two years and, if successful, the drug could be in widespread use in 10 years.
“The problem is that pathogens are acquiring resistance faster than we can develop new antibiotics and this is causing a human health crisis. We now have some strains of tuberculosis that are resistant to all available antibiotics,” Professor Lewis said.
“Teixobactin is highly effective against tuberculosis and there is an opportunity to develop a single-drug treatment against tuberculosis based on teixobactin rather than a treatment regime based on administering three different antibiotics.”
Test-tube studies, published in the journal Nature, showed that teixobactin was able to kill bacteria as quickly as the antibiotics vancomycin and oxacillin.
Scientists at the University of Bonn in Germany have shown that teixobactin works in a unique way by binding to the fatty lipids that form the building blocks used by bacteria to manufacture their cell walls.