The growing army of bacteria able to resist conventional antibiotics is one of the top ten threats to human health, according to the World Health Organization, and, by 2050, will kill ten million people a year and drain $100 million annually from the global economy.
But not if researchers at Pennsylvania’s Wistar Institute can help it.
The research group has concocted a new family of antibiotics that kills a wide range of pathogens while boosting the human immune system’s strength.
A bacterium becomes drug-resistant by mutating the portions of its cell surface that an antibiotic targets.
The research group dove deeper, targeting a cellular process that makes enzymes crucial for almost all dangerous bacteria’s survival but is absent from human cells.
The team used a computer to sort through millions of commercially available substances and rate their ability to bind the enzyme; then the scientists used the most promising of those as starting points to design drugs for the task.
The resulting drugs not only were effective in neutralizing the bacteria’s essential enzyme but also stimulated human immune responses at the same time, giving the drugs double capacity: killing bacteria and making immune responses more powerful at the same time.
TRENDPOST: Wistar’s breakthrough does more than hint at a solution to the pandemic of antibiotic resistance. It also is among the first pharmaceuticals to unite the power of a drug with that of the human immune system in a single compound.
