The next generation of antibiotics is going to allow the cure of an antibiotic-resistant infection by a new principle: disarming instead of killing the bacteria that cause it.
Brad Spellberg and his colleagues at David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA in Los Angeles report their findings in the last October 2 issue of mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology.
The study describes the discovery of a new class of antibiotics which has no ability to kill the bacteria responsible for antibiotic-resistant infections, but that can still protect, by completely preventing the bug from turning on host inflammation. One of these pathogens is Acinetobacter baumannii (A. baumannii), that usually strikes hospital patients and immune-compromised individuals through open wounds, breathing tubes or catheters.
Acinetobacter baumannii
According to this research, in laboratory mice it was possible to mitigate the potentially lethal effects of the bacterium by blocking one of its toxic products.
The researchers found that the strains of A.baumannii that caused the rapidly lethal infections shed lipopolysaccharide (also called endotoxin) while growing. So, thanks to a small molecule called LpxC-1, they managed to block the synthesis of the endotoxin and, consequently, prevented infected mice from getting sick.
Then, LpxC-1 is able to shut down the manufacture of the endotoxin and to stop the body from mounting the inflammatory immune response to it, that is the actual cause of death in seriously ill patients.
Doubtless, the antibiotic resistance is a living matter, since the antibiotic resistant infections are one of the most frequently cause of death.
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