A super-antibiotic capable of wiping out everything from MRSA to TB has been found lurking in soil. In tests, the new medicine rapidly cured infections that should have been fatal. The drug also worked ‘exquisitely’ well against hard-to-treat bugs that damage the heart.
Crucially, it could be a powerful weapon in the war against antibiotic resistance, in which once easy-to-treat infections become deadly after finding sneaky ways of evading powerful drugs. With no new type of antibiotic hitting the market for almost 30 years and bacteria becoming harder to treat by the day, experts have warned medical treatment could soon be dragged back the 19th century.
Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer, has described an ‘apocalyptic scenario’ in which, in just 20 years’ time, routine operations such as hip replacements become deadly because relatively minor infections can’t be quashed.
The new drug, which has been named teixobactin, was discovered after British, German and US scientists went back to basics and studied bacteria from a grassy field in Maine in the US. Many bacteria and fungi naturally make antibiotics to keep themselves safe and kill competitors for food and space and most of the antibiotics we use today have their roots in nature. However, with the easy-to-study microbes well examined and the remaining soil bugs difficult to grow on dishes in the lab, modern scientists have largely abandoned this route of research in favour of more high-tech approaches.
Convinced that the soil held more secrets, researchers from Northeastern University in Boston devised a gadget that allowed them to grow and study the bugs in their native earth.
Of the 10,000 sorts of bacteria that grew, 25 pumped out substances that could potentially be used as antibiotics. And of these, teixobactin was the most promising.
In tests on mice, it killed a wide range of bacteria, including the hospital superbug MRSA. It was ‘exceptionally active’ against the deadly C diff stomach bug and ‘exquisitely active’ against germs that damage the heart. TB was also within its grasp, raising the probability the disease could be treated by a single drug, rather than the cocktail of pills that is used today. Importantly, it did all this without producing side-effects.
The researchers, including scientists from Essex-based drug company Selcia, are particularly excited about the fact that they couldn’t produce any bacteria that were resistant to the drug, no matter how hard they tried. They say the way teixobactin works will make it exceptionally hard for bacteria to find a way of evading it and predict it will take at least 30 years for resistance to develop.
They are refining the recipe and hope to start testing the drug on people in two years.
If all goes well, teixobactin, which would be an injection rather than a pill, could be on the market by 2019. Writing in the journal Nature, researcher Kim Lewis, who has co-founded a company that is developing the drug, said the same technique could be used to find other antibiotic-producing bugs in soil.
In an accompanying article, Gerard Wright, a Canadian expert in antibiotic resistance, said that ‘in a field dominated by doom and gloom’ the work ‘offers hope that innovation and creativity can combine to solve the antibiotics crisis’. Professor Mark Woolhouse, of Edinburgh University, said it is a ‘tantalising prospect that this discovery is just the iceberg’. Laura Piddock, professor of microbiology at Birmingham University, said the technique could be a ‘game-changer’ for discovering new antibiotics.
However, Mark Enright, leading microbiologist and independent consultant, cautioned that there are still many important infections that the new drug does not tackle. This includes illnesses caused by E coli and klebsiella, a bug that is now sometime simply untreatable. Professor Neil Woodward, of Public Health England, said: ‘The rise in antibiotic resistance is a threat to modern healthcare as we know it so this discovery could potentially help to bridge the ever increasing gap between infections and the medicines we have available to treat them.
‘Taking any potential antibacterial compound from discovery to successful licensing is a long, costly and difficult process.
‘However it is one that needs to be encouraged while we tackle other elements that contribute to the development of antibiotic resistance and seek to preserve the antibiotics we do have.’
Professor Nigel Brown, president of the Society for General Microbiology, said: ‘We desperately need new antibiotics to tackle bacterial infections – this is a very promising development.’
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