US scientists engineers toughest antibiotic to fight bacterial infections

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have revamped to a lifesaving antibiotic called vancomycin, making it capable of eliminating the threat of antibiotic-resistant infections for years to come.

The researchers, led by Dale Boger, co-chair of TSRI’s Department of Chemistry, discovered a way to structurally modify vancomycin to make an already-powerful version of the antibiotic even more potent.

“Doctors could use this modified form of vancomycin without fear of resistance emerging,” said Boger, whose team announced the finding in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Thus new version of vancomycin is designed to be ultra-tough and appears to be a thousand times more potent than the old drug, PNAS. It has been prescribed by doctors for 60 years, and bacteria are now developing resistance to it.

Boger called vancomycin “magical” for its proven strength against infections, and previous studies by Boger and his colleagues at TSRI had shown that it is possible to add two modifications to vancomycin to make it even more potent. “With these modifications, you need less of the drug to have the same effect,” Boger said.

The new study shows that scientists can make a third modification – which interferes with a bacterium’s cell wall in a new way – with promising results. Combined with the previous modifications, this alteration gives vancomycin a 1,000-fold increase in activity, meaning doctors would need to use less of the antibiotic to fight infection.

Lanre Yusuf a medical practitioner based in Lagos said, the misuse of antibiotics contributes to drug resistant strains of bacteria.

“When antibiotics are used for things other than bacterial infections, like the flu, or not taken as the doctor prescribed it is better to stop taking the antibiotics earlier than the intended full course of treatment because they are associated with severe side effects, without necessarily being able to treat the infection. Antibiotics are only effective against bacterial infections, and they should never be used for viral infections such as a cold or flu,” says Yusuf.

This version of vancomycin hopes to correct this.

“Organisms just can’t simultaneously work to find a way around three independent mechanisms of action. Even if they found a solution to one of those, the organisms would still be killed by the other two,” said Boger.

Anthonia Obokoh with wired reports