Is this the answer to doctors' prayers? Super-antibiotic that could wipe out diseases from MRSA to TB is hailed as a 'game-changer' by scientists
- In tests, new medicine rapidly cured infections that should have been fatal
- Called teixobactin, it killed a wide range of bacteria, including MRSA
- Could be a powerful weapon in the war against antibiotic resistance
- Antibiotic was found lurking in soil in a grassy field in Maine, U.S.
A super-antibiotic capable of wiping out everything from MRSA to TB has been found lurking in soil.
In tests, the new medicine rapidly cured infections that should have been fatal.
The drug also worked ‘exquisitely’ well against hard-to-treat bugs that damage the heart.
Crucially,
it could be a powerful weapon in the war against antibiotic resistance,
in which once easy-to-treat infections become deadly after finding
sneaky ways of evading powerful drugs.
With
no new type of antibiotic hitting the market for almost 30 years and
bacteria becoming harder to treat by the day, experts have warned
medical treatment could soon be dragged back the 19th century.
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Hope: In tests, the new medicine,
teixobactin, rapidly cured infections that should have been fatal Image
shows antibiotic drugs being tested for resistance against bacteria
Dame
Sally Davies, the chief medical officer, has described an ‘apocalyptic
scenario’ in which, in just 20 years’ time, routine operations such as
hip replacements become deadly because relatively minor infections can’t
be quashed.
The
new drug, which has been named teixobactin, was discovered after
British, German and US scientists went back to basics and studied
bacteria from a grassy field in Maine in the US.
Many
bacteria and fungi naturally make antibiotics to keep themselves safe
and kill competitors for food and space and most of the antibiotics we
use today have their roots in nature.
However,
with the easy-to-study microbes well examined and the remaining soil
bugs difficult to grow on dishes in the lab, modern scientists have
largely abandoned this route of research in favour of more high-tech
approaches.
Convinced
that the soil held more secrets, researchers from Northeastern
University in Boston devised a gadget that allowed them to grow and
study the bugs in their native earth.
Of the 10,000 sorts of bacteria that grew, 25 pumped out substances that could potentially be used as antibiotics.
And of these, teixobactin was the most promising.
In tests on mice, it killed a wide range of bacteria, including the hospital superbug MRSA.
It
was ‘exceptionally active’ against the deadly C diff stomach bug and
‘exquisitely active’ against germs that damage the heart.
TB
was also within its grasp, raising the probability the disease could be
treated by a single drug, rather than the cocktail of pills that is
used today.
Importantly, it did all this without producing side-effects.
The
researchers, including scientists from Essex-based drug company Selcia,
are particularly excited about the fact that they couldn’t produce any
bacteria that were resistant to the drug, no matter how hard they tried.
They
say the way teixobactin works will make it exceptionally hard for
bacteria to find a way of evading it and predict it will take at least
30 years for resistance to develop.
They are refining the recipe and hope to start testing the drug on people in two years.
If all goes well, teixobactin, which would be an injection rather than a pill, could be on the market by 2019.
Writing
in the journal Nature, researcher Kim Lewis, who has co-founded a
company that is developing the drug, said the same technique could be
used to find other antibiotic-producing bugs in soil.
In
an accompanying article, Gerard Wright, a Canadian expert in antibiotic
resistance, said that ‘in a field dominated by doom and gloom’ the work
‘offers hope that innovation and creativity can combine to solve the
antibiotics crisis’.
Professor Mark Woolhouse, of Edinburgh University, said it is a ‘tantalising prospect that this discovery is just the iceberg’.
Laura
Piddock, professor of microbiology at Birmingham University, said the
technique could be a ‘game-changer’ for discovering new antibiotics.
Powerful: The 'super-antibiotic',
which was found in soil in Maine, U.S., is capable of wiping out
everything from MRSA (pictured) to TB, scientists say
However,
Mark Enright, leading microbiologist and independent consultant,
cautioned that there are still many important infections that the new
drug does not tackle.
This includes illnesses caused by E coli and klebsiella, a bug that is now sometime simply untreatable.
Professor
Neil Woodward, of Public Health England, said: ‘The rise in antibiotic
resistance is a threat to modern healthcare as we know it so this
discovery could potentially help to bridge the ever increasing gap
between infections and the medicines we have available to treat them.
‘Taking any potential antibacterial compound from discovery to successful licensing is a long, costly and difficult process.
‘However
it is one that needs to be encouraged while we tackle other elements
that contribute to the development of antibiotic resistance and seek to
preserve the antibiotics we do have.’
Professor
Nigel Brown, president of the Society for General Microbiology, said:
‘We desperately need new antibiotics to tackle bacterial infections –
this is a very promising development.’
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