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Scientists discover first major new antibiotic in 25 years

neversickanymore

neversickanymore

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Scientists discover first major new antibiotic in 25 years
By Ryan Whitwam Jan. 8, 2015

teixobactin-590x330.jpg


There’s a microbial war going on right under our very noses, and after 25 years of little to no success, scientists have found a new way to repurpose the weapons of this war for our own use. An experimental antibiotic called teixobactin is now being tested as a way to combat infections that have evolved resistance to other drugs. Researchers have high hopes that teixobactin will prove safe and effective in humans, but mouse studies have been overwhelmingly positive.

So why has it been decades since a new antibiotic compound has been discovered? As with most drugs on the market, antibiotics are produced in nature. The trick is finding, isolating, and producing them in useful quantities. Antibiotic compounds are utilized by bacteria to kill other strains of bacteria, thus freeing up space and resources for their offspring. The problem, however, is that most bacteria won’t grow in the lab.

Look at a sample of soil and 99% of the bacteria living in it cannot be grown using standard methods. Many of them don’t even have names.

Teixobactin’s discovery comes thanks to a new method of screening these unculturable bacteria. Scientists at Northeastern University in Boston with support from the NIH and German government developed a device called the Ichip. Soil is diluted with nutrient agar and placed in the Ichip. The surface is covered with tiny wells separated by semi-permeable membranes that trap individual bacterial cells. With the organisms corralled, scientists can study them without creating a culture.
Click to expand...

continued here http://www.geek.com/science/scientists-discover-first-major-new-antibiotic-in-25-years-1613051/
 
Excellent post!
What's interesting with teixobactin is that it targets fatty molecules in the cell membrane/wall rather than the much more mutable proteins. I've got a bit of a background in antimicrobials if anyone has any other questions on this one. One thing to keep in mind though is that there are still potential ways for resistance to develop to this drug, though it is far less likely than what we would expect for a class such as the beta-lactams

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teixobactin
 
there are a few antibiotics that attack the membrane (daptomycin, polymyxins, gramicidins), but most of them are too toxic for internal use (daptomycin can be used i.v. but it's still more toxic than more commonly used antibiotics). so i wouldn't expect this one to be too different. still a replacement for daptomycin (which isn't as effective as it once was) would surely be a good thing.
 
What about kinds of antibiotics that interfere with the chemical messenging between bacteria, the cybernetic type of messenging that lets a colony know when a critical population is met so that the entire colony has the manpower to go on a siege? I would have thought it should be relatively easy to synthesize compounds that suppress that communication so that at least very nasty critters don't go virulent.

For some reason I appreciate that this new antibiotic contains no heteroatoms. Gay pride?
 
I like the way it (almost) has a meth residue on the far left.
 
Put a methylendioxy on that benzene, then you got a winner, an empathogen antibiotic.
 
Well I definitely wish those bacteria would stop living in that soil ;)
 
It's methyl-phenylalanine without the carboxy group maybe.
Plus, it has the stereochemistry of D-phenylalanine (if you want to make that comparison), which is not found in nature IIRC.
 
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