Superantibiotics are getting closer
Julia Bondar, Copper News
Israeli scientists in the process of studying the antibacterial properties of natural peptides have created an antibiotic that acts even on multidrug-resistant bacteria.
Researchers have created a special combination of peptides with antibacterial properties. It was obtained from random repetitions of two amino acids with the necessary properties. Studies have shown that these peptides effectively destroy many bacteria, including those that are found to be highly resistant to various antibiotics. In collaboration with Dr. Maxim Ryadnov from the National Institute of Physics of England (England's National Institute of Physics), researchers were able to predict the mechanism of peptides of antimicrobial activity. It was found that peptide mixtures successfully perforate the bacterial cell membrane and create pores in it.
The study was conducted by a group of scientists from the Institute of Biochemistry, Food Science and Nutrition, as well as the Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment at Hebrew University (Hebrew University's Institute of Biochemistry, Food Science and Nutrition at the Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment in Rehovot) under the leadership of Maxim Ryadnov (Dr. Maxim G. Ryadnov). During the experiments, it first turned out that the new substance effectively destroys drug-resistant bacteria, but at the same time damages human red blood cells. Then the scientists carried out a certain chemical change in the peptide mixture, during which the toxicity to the cells of the human body disappeared, but the antibacterial activity remained. The scientists published the results of their work in the journal of the German Chemical Society Angewandte Chemie (Hayouka et al., Binary Encoding of Random Peptide Sequences for Selective and Differential Antimicrobial Mechanisms).
Reviewers called the study "the most important discovery" in the field of antibiotics, the Jerusalem Post newspaper reports. The scientists themselves believe that the results of their research "will contribute to the creation of new antibiotics and will help reduce mortality from infectious diseases in the future."
Recall that back in 2008, Italian scientists proposed synthesizing a powerful antibiotic from protective peptides produced by the skin of frogs and toads. Later, more detailed studies on the effect of peptides contained in frog mucus on the growth of pathogenic flora and various bacteria were conducted by scientists from the United Arab Emirates and China. This year, the results of a similar study conducted by scientists from India and the USA were also published. They investigated the effect of 32 peptides from Indian frog mucus on strains of various bacteria and viruses. It turned out that 4 peptides are able to fight the human influenza virus. Now scientists are faced with the task of making antimicrobial peptides resistant to destruction by human enzymes in order to turn them into a drug.
Attempts to create a super-antibiotic have been made before, and some of them have been crowned with tangible success.
So, in 2013, scientists from the pharmaceutical company Astex Pharmaceuticals (California, USA) they reported successful trials on an animal model of a new broad–spectrum protein antibiotic active against super-microbes - microorganisms resistant to the action of other antibacterial agents, including methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), as well as the causative agent of anthrax Bacillus anthracis. The antibiotic obtained by scientists was called Epimerox (Epimerox). The mechanism of its action is similar to the principle of action of bacteriophage viruses. This principle was not used by scientists for the first time: in 2012, a group of scientists from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of California reported the discovery of bacteriophages capable of infecting bacterial cells Propionibacterium acnes, which promotes the development of an inflammatory process in the sebaceous glands of the skin.
In 2015, scientists from Northeastern University in Boston, together with colleagues from the University of Bonn in Germany, announced the discovery of a new class of antibiotics. The group was named "Theixobactinae". The antibiotic teixobactin, obtained from the soil gram-negative bacterium Elephtheria terrae during the study of more than 10,000 strains of soil bacteria, did not affect the structural proteins of other microorganisms, but the components of their cell walls, destroying them. The effect of the new antibiotic was tested on bacteria resistant to other antibiotics – Staphylococcus aureus (Staphylococcus aureus) and Pneumococcus (Streptococcus pneumoniae), and good results were obtained, during which theixobactin was recognized as a very promising direction.
In June 2017, scientists from the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, modified a fairly old antibiotic vancomycin to work with resistant bacteria and enhanced its effect 25 thousand times, creating a molecule with three different principles of action. The principle of its action is also based on the thinning of the cell wall of evolved bacteria. Experiments have shown that bacteria cannot develop resistance to it even after fifty rounds of treatment. With other antibiotics, only a few rounds are enough. However, the development of a new super-vancomycin is still far away, the substance must be tested in bacteria, then in animals, and then clinical trials in humans.
Scientists around the world have long dreamed of creating a superantibiotic, currently this is the number 1 issue facing pharmacists. Pathogenic bacteria resistant to antibiotics are still winning the race with humanity: scientists simply do not have time to create more and more new drugs that would outpace the emergence of resistance in bacteria. In this race, there are only two ways for a person to win: either critically limit the use of antibiotics, which at the moment is not possible to do, or invent more and more new drugs to which pathogenic bacteria will not develop resistance. Work is being carried out in several directions at once in different countries of the world, and, perhaps, the appearance of a super-drug is just around the corner.
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20.06.2017