The murderous duo
Probiotics and antibiotics combine against dangerous superbugs
Evgenia Efimova, Vesti
Today there is an arms race between humanity and bacteria. Unfortunately, we are not the winners. The reason is that bacteria are constantly changing and evolving, gradually developing resistance to modern drugs.
Recently, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have found a way to combine probiotics and antibiotics in the fight against superbugs.
No matter how effective antibiotics are, the excessive use of these drugs threatens to return to the "dark ages" of medicine, where even the most ordinary procedures and diseases will again become life-threatening.
Some groups of scientists will develop new antibiotics and alternative treatments, while others are trying to make the most of existing technologies, for example, by "rearming" old antibiotics.
MIT specialists decided to go the other way and combine the Bio-K+ probiotic with the commonly used antibiotic tobramycin.
Each of them is effective in destroying certain superbugs. For example, Bio-K+ contains three types of lactobacilli often found in yogurts. They are capable of destroying the dangerous methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).
However, researchers do not know exactly how the probiotic kills MRSA. Perhaps lactic acid, peptides or other proteins that they produce play a role here.
Now about another member of the duo: the choice fell on tobramycin, because it is effective against Pseudomonas aeruginosa (Pseudomonas aeruginosa).
The two types of bacteria mentioned above are often found when wounds are infected. But using tobramycin and Bio-K+ alone will not bring the desired result, because the antibiotic will destroy the probiotic.
To prevent this, scientists "hid" Bio-K+ in a protective capsule made of alginate. The latter is part of the biofilm that bacterial colonies create for their protection, and is produced in large quantities for various industrial purposes.
To test the resulting combination, the scientists added a mixture to a Petri dish containing P.aeruginosa and MRSA. It turned out that the "fighters" completely destroyed all the bacteria.
If scientists did not hide Bio-K+ in alginate, the antibiotic, as expected, killed the probiotic. In this case, MRSA survived the attack.
"When we used only one component, antibiotics or probiotics, it could not destroy all pathogenic microorganisms. But [complete cleansing] is important when a person has wounds with various bacteria. In this case, antibiotics alone are not enough to kill them all," says lead author of the study Zhihao Li (Zhihao Li).
According to the researchers who published the results in the scientific publication Advanced Materials (Li et al., Biofilm‐Inspired Encapsulation of Probiotics for the Treatment of Complex Infections), the next step is to test the combination on animals and humans. If the results are positive, such treatment can be used for wound healing.
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