Scientists at the University of Liverpool are a step closer to being able to fight “superbugs,” including MRSA.
The university announced Tuesday that its researchers had created a synthetic version of teixobactin, which is a molecule some bacteria use to kill other bacteria.
The university called this new version a “game changing” antibiotic, saying it is more efficient, safer and can be inexpensively produced.
“Introducing synthetic diversity to generate the library of synthetic teixobactins is important to overcome the high failure rates associated with the next stages of drug development,” lead researcher Dr. Ishwar Singh said.
The research proved the synthetic teixobactins can kill bacteria resistant to antibiotics in humans. “This suggests that in future, patients may be treated with just one dose of teixobactin per day for systemic life-threatening resistant bacterial infections,” the university said.
Another promising feature of synthetic teixobactins is that they remain strong and stable at room temperature for years, so they won’t need refrigeration the way many medicines do. This means they have they can more easily be sent around the world to tackle stubborn bacterial infections.
“Our motivation is to adapt the natural teixobactin molecule and make it suitable for human use. This is a journey. Through this project we have demonstrated that we can make synthetic molecules at low cost and with high safety, which potently kills the resistant bacteria in mice. The advantage of synthetic diversity is that we can select or deselect properties and modify molecules to impact potency and other desirable drug-like qualities. Our ultimate goal is to have a number of viable drugs from our modular synthetic teixobactin platform which can be used as a ‘last line of defense’ against superbugs to save lives currently lost due to AMR,” Singh said.
“Our next steps will be to focus upon the central benefit of synthetic teixobactin to overcome multi-drug resistant bacteria in different disease models, scale up process, followed by safety testing, which if successful, could potentially be used in hospitals as an investigational new medicine and be turned into a drug fit for treating resistant bacterial infections in humans globally. We will work with colleagues from CEIDR which have expertise in antimicrobials from drug discovery to clinic, to develop synthetic teixobactins into viable drugs,” he concluded.
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