Long-Abandoned Antibiotic Makes Come-back to Battle Superbugs
Over-reliance on and misuse of antibiotics has led to warnings of a future without effective medicines.
Scientists are presently searching for new drugs, antibiotics; testing microbes in sources as diverse as soil, saves and amphibian blood in addition to trying to develop new, lab-made synthetic antibiotics. All in pursuit of better new and better antibiotics.
Yet, despite all these remarkable advances, we are running out of effective antibiotics- the drugs that fight infection and are essential for everything from organ transplants to the treatment of food poisoning.
Therefore, scientists have now found and re-enlisted a retired antibiotic to come back and save us all.
Octapeptin was discovered 40 years ago but was largely unused since, forgotten by scientists as other drugs took priority. Researchers from the University of Queensland in Australia have now re-analyzed this old and largely forgotten antibiotic and believe the drug could potentially take on resilient superbugs.
“Octapeptins were discovered in the late 1970s but were not selected for development at the time, as there was an abundance of new antibiotics with thousands of people working in antibiotic research and development,” says one of the researchers, Matt Cooper from the University of
Queensland in Australia.“Given the very few researchers left in this field now, and the sparse pipeline for new antibiotics, we’ve used modern drug discovery procedures to re-evaluate its effectiveness against superbugs.”
Professor Cooper said there were no new classes of antibiotics available for Gram-negative bacteria, with increasing incidence of extensive drug resistance around the world. Gram-negative bacteria are harder to kill as disease organisms, because they have an extra membrane to penetrate that is often hidden by a capsule or slime layer which acts to camouflage them from drugs and our immune system.
“The emergence of resistance to meropenem, and now colistin, the antibiotic of last resort, means multi-drug and extensively drug-resistant bacteria are now a reality confronting clinicians. Octapeptin showed superior antimicrobial activity to colistin against extensively resistant Gram-negative bacteria in early pre-clinical testing. In addition, octapeptin was shown to be potentially less toxic to the kidneys than colistin” he said.
Despite urgent circumstances, only one new class of antibiotic has emerged in the past 30 years. As such, the University of Queensland researchers are hoping that by re-analyzing the older antibiotic and introducing it as a superior alternative once colistin fails, they will at least have provided another weapon in our arsenal; potentially, a very powerful one.
The team’s creative solution could also inspire other research that looks to repurpose old, forgotten about drugs — or even create brand new ones — that could be stockpiled for the ongoing fight against antibiotic resistance.
