Antibiotic Resistance - Blog Posts
Antibiotic resistance is one of the most pressing problems of our times. Traditional antimicrobial drugs aren’t working the way they used to, and the rise of “superbugs” could bring about the post-antibiotic age, where easily treatable infections suddenly become life-threatening incurable illnesses.
There have been a slew of new discoveries recently that have revealed brand new ways to turn the tide, but the latest revelation at the hands of a team from George Mason University is a particularly unusual sounding one. As it turns out, we could use the blood of dragons to annihilate superbugs.
No, this isn’t an analogy or a plot line from Game of Thrones. The devil-toothed Komodo dragon – the devious beast from Indonesia – has a particular suite of chemical compounds in its blood that’s pure anathema to a wide range of bacteria.
They’re known as CAMPs – cationic antimicrobial peptides – and although plenty of living creatures (including humans) have versions of these, Komodo dragons have 48, with 47 of them being powerfully antimicrobial. The team managed to cleverly isolate these CAMPs in a laboratory by using electrically-charged hydrogels – strange, aerated substances – to suck them out of the dragons’ blood samples.
Synthesizing their own versions of eight of these CAMPs, they put them up against two strains of lab-grown “superbugs,” MRSA and Pseudomona aeruginosa, to see if they had any effect. Remarkably, all eight were able to kill the latter, whereas seven of them destroyed all trace of both, doing something that plenty of conventional antibiotic drugs couldn’t.
Writing in the Journal of Proteome Research, the researchers write that these powerful CAMPs explain why Komodo dragons are able to contain such a dense, biodiverse population of incredibly dangerous bacteria in their mouths. Although it’s not clear where all these bacteria originally came from, the chemical compounds in their blood ensures that they’ll never be properly infected.
In fact, it was this ability to co-exist with such lethal bacteria that piqued the interest of the researchers in the first place.
“Komodo dragon serum has been demonstrated to have in vitro antibacterial properties,” they note. “The role that CAMPs play in the innate immunity of the Komodo dragon is potentially very informative, and the newly identified Komodo dragon CAMPs may lend themselves to the development of new antimicrobial therapeutics.”
It’ll be awhile before these CAMPs are tested in human trials, but the idea that we’re effectively using dragon’s blood, or plasma, to fight against resurgent diseases is genuinely quite thrilling. Alongside Hulk-like drugs that physically rip bacteria apart, there’s a chance that, with the help of these legendary lizards, we may win this war yet.
Antibiotic resistance has been called one of the biggest public health threats of our time. There is a pressing need for new and novel antibiotics to combat the rise in antibiotic-resistant bacteria worldwide.
Researchers from Florida International University’s Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine are part of an international team that has discovered a new broad-spectrum antibiotic that contains arsenic. The study, published in Nature’s Communication Biology, is a collaboration between Barry P. Rosen, Masafumi Yoshinaga, Venkadesh Sarkarai Nadar and others from the Department of Cellular Biology and Pharmacology, and Satoru Ishikawa and Masato Kuramata from the Institute for Agro-Environmental Sciences, NARO in Japan.
“The antibiotic, arsinothricin or AST, is a natural product made by soil bacteria and is effective against many types of bacteria, which is what broad-spectrum means,” said Rosen, co-senior author of the study published in the Nature journal, Communications Biology. “Arsinothricin is the first and only known natural arsenic-containing antibiotic, and we have great hopes for it.”
Although it contains arsenic, researchers say they tested AST toxicity on human blood cells and reported that “it doesn’t kill human cells in tissue culture.”
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Antibiotic Resistance Will Soon Hit the Tipping Point, Unless We Act
Antibiotic Resistance Will Soon Hit the Tipping Point, Unless We Act
Antibiotic-resistant superbugs are enough of a severe, genuine threat to global populations that the UN has placed the issue on par with the spread of Ebola and HIV. The livestock industry is a major factor contributing to the rapid proliferation of these superbugs, swift action is required.
The gut bacteria inside 1000-year-old mummies from the Inca Empire are resistant to most of today’s antibiotics, even though we only discovered these drugs within the last 100 years.
“At first we were very surprised,” Tasha Santiago-Rodriguez of California Polytechnic State University in San Louis Opisbo, told the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology last month.
Her team studied the DNA within the guts of three Incan mummies dating back to between the 10th and 14thcenturies and six mummified people from Italy, from between the 15th and 18th centuries. They found an array of genes that have the potential to resist almost all modern antibiotics, including penicillin, vancomycin and tetracycline.
These ancient genes were largely in microbes whose resistance is problematic today, including Enteroccocus bacteria that can infect wounds and cause urinary tract infections. But they found that many other species, including some harmless ones, carried some of these resistant genes too.
Enterococcus enigma
“When you think about it, almost all these antibiotics are naturally produced, so it makes sense to find antibiotic genes as well,” says Santiago-Rodriguez.
Their finding shows that genes that can confer resistance to antibiotics were relatively widespread hundreds of years before Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. “It’s ridiculous to think evolution of antibiotic resistance began when penicillin was discovered,” said team-member Raul Cano, also at California Polytechnic State University, at the meeting while discussing the findings. “It’s been going on for 2 billion years.”
These genes existed long before antibiotics became common, but it is our overuse of these drugs in both people and livestock that caused the superbug resistance to explode worldwide, said Cano.
“This is exciting data,” says Adam Roberts, who studies antibiotic resistance genes at University College London. While it is already well known that antibiotic resistance occurred naturally before people started using antibiotics, this study shows that resistance genes were already within the human gut long before we started using these drugs, he says.
“It begs the question of what was selecting for these genes at this time? Was it the natural production of antibiotics by other bacteria, or were there other, as yet unknown forces at play?” asks Roberts.