Bacteria are rapidly developing resistance to the best drugs, leaving us on the brink of a serious crisis
When bacteria encounter dangersenvironment – such as antibiotics – only the strongest survive, meaning that eventually the entire population gains the ability to resist the drugs. Particularly problematic are gram-negative bacteria, which protect themselves with thicker cell walls and molecular pumps that reject drugs.
Scientists involved in the new studyhave developed a new antibiotic candidate that shows great promise. The team started with an existing antibiotic that is effective against gram-positive bacteria and adapted it with a series of structural modifications to make it stronger against gram-negative strains.
Named fabimycin, the new drugthe agent worked well against more than 200 clinically isolated colonies of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, including a total of 54 strains of bacteria such as E. coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Acinetobacter baumannii. In tests on mice, fabimycin was found to clear drug-resistant cases of pneumonia or urinary tract infections, lowering bacterial levels even lower than before infection.
It is important to note that fabimicin actsrelatively selective, leaving some types of harmless bacteria intact. This is better than many existing antibiotics, which are known to indiscriminately kill many beneficial bacteria in the microbiome, resulting in a number of adverse side effects.