By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay ReporterWEDNESDAY, Jan. 7, 2015 (HealthDay News) -- Laboratory researchers say they've discovered a new antibiotic that could prove valuable in fighting disease-causing bacteria that no longer respond to older, more frequently used drugs.
The new antibiotic, teixobactin, has proven effective against a number of bacterial infections that have developed resistance to existing antibiotic drugs, researchers report in Jan. 7 in the journal Nature.
Researchers have used teixobactin to cure lab mice of MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), a bacterial infection that sickens 80,000 Americans and kills 11,000 every year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The new antibiotic also worked against the bacteria that causes pneumococcal pneumonia.
Cell culture tests also showed that the new drug effectively killed off drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis, anthrax and Clostridium difficile, a bacteria that causes life-threatening diarrhea and is associated with 250,000 infections and 14,000 deaths in the United States each year, according to the CDC.
"My estimate is that we will probably be in clinical trials three years from now," said the study's senior author, Kim Lewis, director of the Antimicrobial Discovery Center at Northeastern University in Boston.
Lewis said researchers are working to refine the new antibiotic and make it more effective for use in humans.
Dr. Ambreen Khalil, an infectious disease specialist at Staten Island University Hospital in New York City, said teixobactin "has the potential of being a valuable addition to a limited number of antibiotic options that are currently available."
In particular, its effectiveness against MRSA "may prove to be critically significant," Khalil said. And its potent activity against C. difficile also "makes it a promising compound at this time," she added.
Most antibiotics are created from bacteria found in the soil, but only about 1 percent of these microorganisms will grow in petri dishes in laboratories, Lewis said.
Because of this, it's become increasingly difficult to find new antibiotics in nature. The 1960s heralded the end of the initial era of antibiotic discovery, and synthetic antibiotics were unable to replace natural products, the authors said in background notes.
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