Experts discover new antibiotic
8 Jan 2015
A team of researchers from Northeastern University in Boston, US has discovered a new antibiotic, known as teixobactin.
The researchers used a multi-channel device, called iChip, to isolate and grow uncultured bacteria - suggesting their method could yield more than 20 new types of antibiotic.
Antimicrobial resistance has been an ever increasing threat in recent years, with no new antibiotics having been available since the 1987.
“It may be that we will find more, perhaps many more, antibiotics using these latest techniques. We should certainly be trying
Professor Mark Woolhouse
Head of business development at the Wellcome Trust Richard Seabrook said: “Although still in the early stages of research, the discovery of a potential new class of antibiotics is good news: the development of new antibiotics has stalled in recent decades, while resistance to existing drugs becomes an ever more serious threat to human health.”
One of the issues of discovering new antibiotics is that it is very difficult to isolate antibiotic compounds.
According to reports, the iChip screening tool “could be a ’game changer’ for discovering new antibiotics as it allows compounds to be isolated from soil producing micro-organisms that do not grow under normal laboratory conditions”.
Most promising among this discovery is the new antibiotic teixobactin, which has been used to treat MRSA and S. pneumoniae infections within mice.
Though experts have said teixobactin could be very useful, it is an anti-Gram-positive antibiotic and the world is “desperate” for new anti-Gram-negative medicines.
“Teixobactin has no activity against Gram-negative bacteria such as E. coli. However, the iChip tool developed by [lead researcher] Kim Lewis and colleagues can now be applied to find natural products with activity against these microorganisms,” said Laura Piddock, a professor of Microbiology at the University of Birmingham.
Likewise, Mark Woolhouse, professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, said: “Any report of a new antibiotic is auspicious, but what most excites me about the paper by Lewis et al. is the tantalising prospect that this discovery is just the tip of the iceberg.
“It may be that we will find more, perhaps many more, antibiotics using these latest techniques. We should certainly be trying.”
A full account of the research has been published in the journal Nature, and can be found here.
