Superbug breakthrough

British scientists claim they have beaten more than a dozen rival teams around the world in the race towards a new synthetic antibiotic.

They hope that the agent – an improved version of a natural antibiotic called teixobactin, discovered in soil by US scientists in 2015 – will provide a new treatment for resistant hospital superbugs and a range of other infections fast becoming impervious to 20th-century antibiotics.

The group from the University of Lincoln has been collaborating with groups from the University of Liverpool as well as academic researchers in the Netherlands, Belgium and Singapore to achieve the advance.

Their data, just published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, provides the first evidence using mice that the treatment can knock out methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and vancomycin-resistant enterococci.

Both appear on a World Health Organisation [WHO] list of 12 “priority pathogens” – treatment-resistant families of bacteria that represent the biggest threats to human health.

Their work is an advance, but not yet a game-changer.

Data from the Philadelphia-based Pew Charitable Trusts, which are tracking progress in the superbug war, indicates there are 80 possible antibiotic drugs, vaccines and other non-traditional candidate products in development round the world which could save mankind from losing the war against new generations of killer infections.

The need has never been more urgent. A recent global study from a team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, showed the problem had been fuelled by an astonishing 65% increase in antibiotic use between 2000 and 2015.

Current British projections indicate that, by the time today’s primary schoolchildren reach adulthood, deaths from infectious illnesses will claim at least 10 million lives a year worldwide and limb amputations to halt the spread of infection will become commonplace – unless we find new treatments.

“We are optimistic,” Dr Ishwar Singh, a specialist in novel drug design and development, who is leading the Lincoln project, said.

“We are the first people worldwide to achieve this step.

“We have not only proved our treatment kills the bacteria, but we have also shown it reduces inflammation at the same time.”

The results so far are only in mice, but Singh is in talks with three pharmaceutical industry investors and he hopes the product will go into human trials within three years.

At the University of East Anglia in Norwich, Professor Changjiang Dong, an expert in molecular medicine, is also forging ahead with a different candidate weapon.

This is a treatment that blocks construction of the two-layer cell walls protecting virulent so-called Gram-negative bacteria, which include resistant strains of salmonella, E coli and legionella, all of which regularly cause fatal outbreaks of disease.

Dong is as upbeat as Singh. “We think we have found a very good target for a new treatment. I am very optimistic about where this will lead,” he said.

In Leicester, Professor Martha Clokie, another expert on infectious diseases, is working on phages – tightly targeted viruses that attack disease-causing bacteria, which could provide an answer to the search for a new way of destroying antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

She is similarly hopeful, but, like the others, needs more investment to develop her work.

Official figures indicate that in the UK about 5 000 people a year die from illness that could previously be treated by penicillin and its myriad derivatives. – The Telegraph