A New Line of Antibiotics Is Coming to the Rescue

I think it’s pretty common knowledge that civilization has a bacteria situation on its hands. Put simply, harmful bacteria are evolving around our antibiotic arsenal faster than we can make new varieties of antibiotics. The current last line of defense we have is a drug called Linezolid, which made it to market in 2000 and while it remains a powerful defense—acting against bacteria in a way unique from any other antibiotic—there’s evidence that bacteria are on track to become resistant to the drug. This isn’t a surprise—the history of antibiotics is an arms race between drug technology and bacterial evolution. Lately, humans have been losing.

That loss is to the tune of 19,000 yearly deaths in the United States, 25,000 in Europe, and antibiotic resistance is just getting started. Fortunately, there are some glimmers of hope for the antibiotic next wave. One of those is featured in a paper today out in Nature Chemical Biology courtesy of researchers at Ontario’s McMaster University. It identifies a class of compounds that work against bacteria by killing off its ability to produce the vitamins and amino acids it needs to survive and reproduce. This is fairly different than anything we have so far, either the original straight-up bacteria killing drugs or later drugs that prevent bacteria from making needed proteins, as is the case with Linezolid.

In the Nature paper the researchers describe not just a potential new class of drugs but, crucially, an entire new way of finding drugs by simulating more accurately the conditions bacteria find in the human body. "The approach belies conventional thinking in antibiotic research and development, where researchers typically look for chemicals that block growth in the laboratory under nutrient-rich conditions, where vitamins and amino acids are plentiful," says Eric Brown, the paper's lead author. "But in the human body these substances are in surprisingly short supply and the bacteria are forced to make these and other building blocks from scratch."

So, without resources, the bacteria cease reproducing, and the infection withers. The strategy doesn’t seem any more immune to microbes’ ability to evolve into better killing machines. But hopefully we’ll get even better as a modern species at avoiding the pervasive things humans do to help them evolve, like dosing our livestock with antibiotics and handing out pills for pretty much any ailment or annoyance conceivably related to bacterial infection. It's not hopeless.