Posted on 01/07/2015 9:10:36 PM PST by blam
Lauren F Friedman and Reuters
January 7, 2015
Scientists have discovered a new antibiotic, teixobactin, that can kill serious infections in mice without encountering any detectable resistance, offering a potential new way to get ahead of dangerous evolving superbugs.
The new antibiotic was discovered in a sample of soil.
The research is "ingenious," Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University, told The New York Times.
Researchers said the antibiotic, which has yet to be tested in humans, could one day be used to treat drug-resistant infections caused by the superbug MSRA, as well as tuberculosis, which normally requires a combination of drugs that can have adverse side effects.
Antibiotic-resistant infections already kill 700,000 people each year, with those numbers expected to rise.
"The discovery of this novel compound challenges long-held scientific beliefs and holds great promise for treating an array of menacing infections," said Kim Lewis, a professor at Northeastern University and co-founder of the NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals, which has patented teixobactin.
Still, experts urged caution. Though the researchers said they didn't see signs of poisoning in the mice treated with teixobactin, antibiotics that show promise in mice are often toxic to humans.
"It’s at the test-tube and the mouse level, and mice are not men or women," Schaffner told The Times. "Moving beyond that is a large step, and many compounds have failed."
A New Kind Of Antibiotic
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
In't that always the story with these kinds of discoveries?
Sounds kind of like the discovery of sulfa drugs, it may or may not pan out but one must keep looking to find the next good tool to fight various types of infection.
looks good ,Bookmark
Personally I prefer to wait until they have finished testing.
We Used to Recycle Drugs From Patients’ Urine
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/we-used-recycle-drugs-patients-urine-180953789/?no-ist
It only works against Gram positive bacteria. And we have no idea what it does to people. All we know is that Teixobactin is effective in killing gram-positive superbugs and that so far it isn’t toxic to mice. We don’t know if it carcinogenic to them. In fact, we don’t know if it causes long term damage to mice not noticeable yet. We have no idea what it does to primates and people. I don’t even know if they have tested Teixobactin in a human blood culture yet.
“The discovery of this novel compound challenges long-held scientific beliefs ...”
THAT sounds like “settled science”! Why is anybody allowed to question the “settled science” that superbugs cannot be killed??
The debate is over, isn’t it? These people are preaching voodoo magic and should be banned!! They are not scientist if they don’t accept “settled science”, are they?
Besides all that we would never want to give an untested drug to a dying person, because the drug could kill them. </s>
Stop it. The science is settled.
I thought the “long held” beliefs language was a little strong. I doubt many scientists believed that there existed no new classes of agents that were antibiotics. Most believed we had not discovered any for quite a while. Those are two very different beliefs.
Oh, no way. Settled science - no debating! LOL
Have a look at TETRAPHASE PHARMACEUTICALS (NASD:TTPH). They have some very promising variations of tetracycline under development.
I am a recent convert to Colloidal Silver. It certainly works on my dogs' and cats' skin conditions.
I asked my doc about it and he had never heard of it.
Well, I don't have a personal need for such drugs, even if they were offered today. I just get tired of reading stories about medical breakthroughs that never materialize.
No, they don't all work out. There sometimes are side effects that make taking the drug counter productive. I would rather not take the anti-nausea drug that would cause my kids to be born with only partial limbs.
And then there are things like the heart medicine that didn't do much for your heart but did have a positive benefit to another organ. :)
Sometimes they error too much on the side of caution. But they do try to get it right.
The researchers are too glowingly optimistic about the likelihood of resistance emerging, I believe. In fact, the compound is being touted as “resistant to resistance” based on lab testing. Bacteria are always smarter than the people who develop and use them. While it may have taken 30+ years for Vancomycin resistance to develop, in part that is likely because we didn’t use that much of it until the last decade. Now we regularly see VISA organisms, with reduced susceptibility to Vancomycin and occasionally a totally Vanc resistant isolate.For Vanc resistance, we now often turn to Daptomycin. Discovered in soil from Mt. Ararat, Turkey, Cubist got FDA approval for Daptomycin in 2003. In contrast to the slow resistance with Vancomycin, a case of Daptomycin resistant S. aureus bacteremia (blood stream infection) was reported in 2005. This past summer, I saw Dapto resistance emerge, similarly in patients with inadequately drained foci of infection.
Similarly, Linezolid resistance in MRSA was noted in 2001, only a year after approval. It had been seen in an Enterococcus faecium infection in 1999, even before approval.
My biggest concern, should Teixobactin make it to market, is that it will be squandered as every other good new antibiotic has been, and so resistance will rapidly emerge as the drug is overused. I have particularly been disappointed to see this with the other novel antibiotics developed during my career—Linezolid (Pfizer) and Daptomycin. I see both marketed irresponsibly (including promoting use to Social Service case workers) because they are convenient to use. Medicare has not been willing to pay for home IV antibiotics, so many of us use Daptomycin, which can be given once-daily in an outpatient clinic, so that our patients won’t have to go to a nursing home to receive antibiotics. As a result, we’re creating bacteria resistant to one of our few remaining effective antibiotics. Similarly, Linezolid is wasted for convenience, since it can be given orally; it has also been promoted for inappropriate uses, as treating colonization in wounds or in nursing home patients, rather than infection.
It's actually only 8%.
Gee, no wonder the stuff is so pricey.
My 30ish dentist has never heard of 3D printing.
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