New Antibiotic Stirs Hope Against Resistant Bacteria

Author: Denise Grady
Publication Date: January 7, 2015
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/08/health/from-a-pile-of-dirt-hope-for-a-powerful-new-antibiotic.html?ref=health

Summary: A new method of producing antibiotics has reaped a potential new drug: teixobactin. The unusual process extracts drugs from bacteria that live in dirt. This method has the potential to unlock natural compounds that fight infections and cancer. So far, the drug has been tested on mice and "easily cured severe infections", without side effects. In addition, the drug works in a way that makes it unlikely that bacteria will become resistant to it. However, it has not been tested in humans, and will most likely not be tested in them for two years, so its safety and effectiveness are questionable. These tests will take several years, so if it is approved and becomes available, it will be in five to six years. It will probably have to be injected.

The search is in response the urgent global problem of a rise in infections that resist treatment with commonly used drugs. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, drug-resistant bacteria infect at least two million people a year in the US, and kill 23,000. Additionally, the World Health Organization warned that such infections are occurring all over the world, and that drug resistant strains of many diseases are emerging faster than new antibiotics can be made to fight them. The fact that companies prefer developing more profitable types of drugs exacerbates the problem.

Previously, the natural compounds in teixobactin were unable to be studied because the microbes that produce them could not be grown in the laboratory. In order to grow them, scientists diluted a soil sample, placed it on specialized equipment, then put the equipment into a box of the natural soil, tricking the bacteria into growing.

Relevance: This article relates to what we've learned in two ways. First, when we were studying genetic modification, we studied how to use plasmids so that E. coli changes color and has bacteria resistance. Although teixobactin is still in the early stages of development and also is different from most antibiotics, the process of creating a drug for humans may involve some techniques involving plasmids. Second, the research of the development of teixobactin is in response to antibiotic resistance, which we are currently studying. Antibiotic resistance evolves by natural selection; the few strains of bacteria that happen to be resistant are more likely to reproduce, thus changing the gene pool and making the resistance allele more frequent.