lolamicin defeated 130 drug-resistant strains of common gram-negative bacteria.
by rick richardson
technology this week
despite all the positive effects antibiotics have on the planet, one of the major drawbacks to their use is how they indiscriminately destroy both bad and good bacteria.
besides eliminating disease-causing invaders in the human body, a single course of this life-saving medication can have an “immense” effect on the gut and the microorganisms that live there, according to the national center for biotechnology information.
more: is nasa about to make air travel cheaper? | startup creates legolike brick that can store air pollution | your brain can store 10 times more than anyone thought | how many ev charging stations will we need? | google launches new private space feature | microsoft discovers a security flaw impacting android apps | what is an ai pc, and should i get one? | fool’s gold may not be so foolish now | ai-engineered enzyme could be solution to plastic pollution | german researchers develop ev motor with no rare-earth magnets
exclusively for pro members. log in here or 2022世界杯足球排名 today.
certain bacteria or fungi may occasionally overgrow because of this influence. for example, following antibiotic treatment, women may have a 30 percent chance of acquiring a yeast infection.
researchers at the university of illinois in urbana-champaign are developing a remedy. lolamicin is a novel antibiotic that has been found to target selectively gram-negative infections, sparing other bacteria.
although scientists still need to test the medication on humans, they are optimistic that it can act as a model for the creation of new antibiotics.
gram-negative bacteria are notoriously hard to eradicate and are frequent causes of infections in the bladder, blood, lungs and intestines. one of the most severe risks to global human health is antibiotic resistance. broad-spectrum antibiotics can eliminate both gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria. however, because gram-negative bacteria are more likely to resist our current antibiotics, scientists believe developing medications that can target them is imperative. this increases the likelihood that more bacteria beneficial to human health will survive.
a medication such as lolamicin might be the solution. lolamicin defeated 130 drug-resistant strains of common gram-negative bacteria, including k. pneumoniae, e. coli and e. cloacae, in laboratory dishes. this medication was able to eradicate every single strain of drug-resistant bacteria, where many other antibiotics could not. lolamicin also effectively treated blood infections and acute pneumonia in living rodents, all the while protecting the gut microbiome. the medication had “no effect on non-pathogenic gram-negative commensal bacteria or on gram-positive bacteria” that were living in the mice.
that’s an exciting finding, considering that the diversity of microbial species inhabiting the human gut can rapidly decline after even a brief treatment of antibiotics, and this can last for months before things return to normal. although the effects of those modifications on health are poorly understood, administering some antibiotics can make a patient more susceptible to secondary infections.
but lolamicin isn’t like that. this novel drug does “not cause any substantial changes” to the gut microbiome of mice in the month following therapy, in contrast to gram-positive-only clindamycin and broad-spectrum antibiotic amoxicillin. during this period, mice treated with lolamicin were exposed to clostridium difficile, a bacterial illness that frequently occurs in the colon after the use of antibiotics. those mice treated with lolamicin did not develop c. difficile infections at nearly the same rate as those treated with clindamycin or amoxicillin. the creation of an antibiotic that spares the microbiome could save lives. the united states alone accounts for some 500,000 cases of c. difficile infections annually, of which 30,000 are fatal.
to make sure that infections do not eventually develop resistance to lolamicin, scientists are currently refining their research.
“the intestinal microbiome is central to maintaining host health, and its perturbation can cause many deleterious effects, including c. difficile infection and beyond,” the authors conclude. “pathogen-specific antibiotics such as lolamicin will be critical to minimizing collateral damage to the gut microbiome; this microbiome-sparing effect would make such antibiotics superior for patients compared with antibiotics in current clinical practice.”