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Scientists hail antibiotic to foil resistance

An international public-private collaboration has come up with a promising antibiotic, to which bacteria are unlikely to become resistant for several decades. The drug, called teixobactin, quickly cleared infections in animal tests without side effects.

Although it is at least two years from clinical trials and five years from commercial availability, microbiologists hailed teixobactin as an exciting discovery at a time when politicians and public health leaders worldwide are flagging up the urgent need for drugs to tackle the problem of antibiotic resistance. Details are published in the journal Nature.

Teixobactin comes from a research partnership involving Northeastern University in Boston, the University of Bonn and NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals, one of several US biotechnology companies developing antibiotics.

“We estimate that the evolution of resistance [to teixobactin] will take more than 30 years,” said Kim Lewis of Northeastern, the project leader. “It rapidly clears infection, so we will not need a lengthy regimen of treatment, and it shows excellent activity against hard-to-treat bugs.”

Most antibiotics are derived from soil bacteria, which make the chemicals to kill competing microbes. NovoBiotic has extended this approach with technology that enables researchers to grow species that would not survive in traditional laboratory cultures.

The scientists used a special “diffusion chamber” within the soil to culture microbes that would not grow in normal lab conditions. Screening of these rare species identified a previously unknown species, Elephtheria terrae, which makes teixobactin.

Teixobactin quickly kills Gram-positive bacteria, which are prominent in discussions of antibiotic resistance, including Clostridium difficile, Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Staphylococcus aureus.

Neil Woodford, head of the antimicrobial resistance unit at Public Health England, commented:

“The rise in antibiotic resistance is a threat to modern healthcare as we know it, so this discovery could potentially help to bridge the ever increasing gap between infections and the medicines we have available to treat them.”

But Prof Woodford added: “Although it is a step forward, this new discovery would not be suitable for treating infections caused by E. coli, Klebsiella or other Gram-negative bacteria.”

Teixobactin kills bacteria by breaking down their cell walls, a mode of action similar to vancomycin, which doctors sometimes use as an antibiotic of last resort to treat drug-resistant infections.

They hope that their original approach to bacterial cultivation and screening will soon yield other promising antibiotics, including ones active against Gram-negative bacteria.

“The screening tool developed by these researchers could be a ‘game changer’ for discovering new antibiotics as it allows compounds to be isolated from soil-producing micro-organisms that do not grow under normal laboratory conditions,” commented Laura Piddock, microbiology professor at the University of Birmingham.

Gerard Wright, an antibiotics researcher at McMaster University in Canada, added: “In a field dominated by doom and gloom [the NovoBiotic collaboration] offers hope that innovation and creativity can combine to solve the antibiotics crisis.”