First new antibiotic in 30 years discovered in major breakthrough

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/14/first-new-antibiotic-in-30-years-discovered-in-major-breakthroug

by _lbaq • 10 years ago

198 56 10 years ago

telegraph.co.uk

nerdponx• 10 years ago

What makes me nervous about this is that the antibiotic resistance paranoia will die out, and we'll just start using more antibiotics again.

eivarv3• 10 years ago

It's not unlikely.

But it's not really paranoia, though, as antibiotic resistance poses a real threat.

berntb3• 10 years ago

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there really aren't those (diseases) out to get you...

Alternatively -- are you paranoid enough?

(Ah, this is the same old news first published last year, iirc. This was from January. This is from January 2015: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/... )

Edit: To see more discussion over the last 18 months, google: teixobactin site:news.ycombinator.com. This seems the biggest story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8852487

martinko• 10 years ago

Perhaps, but it is not like there is a significant wave of new antibiotics being discovered now.

kyriakos3• 10 years ago

Once this gets approved for human use it should be put on lock down and be used only in extreme cases of resistant infections. Like a last resort cure to avoid the mistakes of the past and prolong it's usefulness.

paulsutter• 10 years ago

Notably, that's one reason there so little investment in antibiotic r&d. The concern is that sales of a new antibiotic could be very limited because of this very concern.

kyriakos3• 10 years ago

I haven't considered that but its indeed a valid point.

hollander• 10 years ago

This only means that this research should be done by state funded universities and not left to commercial industries.

sndean• 10 years ago

Unless there's some unforeseen toxicity, I don't think they should make it a last resort drug. Just use when necessary.

We already have some very effective, semi-toxic antibiotics like colistin and other peptide-based antibiotics that we use as last resorts.

kyriakos3• 10 years ago

"use when necessary" is really hard to achieve I think. Will be easier to make a policy to keep the medicine use under control rather than change people's mentality over over-prescribing (includes both doctors and patients - all are guilty)

zamalek• 10 years ago

Most importantly, don't feed it to livestock.

tempestn• 10 years ago

From the article: "Crucially, the scientists believe that bacteria will not become resistant to Teixobactin for at least 30 years because of its multiple methods of attack."

Can anyone tell me what would happen if we instead _only_ used this new antibiotic, or at least used it instead of others as often as possible? If it is indeed so potent that bacteria would have difficulty developing a resistance, could we essentially use that window to let resistances to all the other antibiotics die out?

iSnow3• 10 years ago

I doubt that 30 year window. If if were nearly impossible to build a resistance, the bacterium producing the antibiotic would poison itself.

And I am not sure how you'd convince people in underdeveloped countries to use the new and expensive drug only.

agumonkey• 10 years ago

I feel like reading about cryptanalaysis and entropy.

IshKebab• 10 years ago

I'm not sure the resistance to other antibiotics would die out.

JoeAltmaier• 10 years ago

Not necessary. According to the paper

    "Teixobactin inhibits cell wall synthesis "

Its no more possible that a cell could become resistant, than you or I could become resistant to having our head blown off.

AstralStorm• 10 years ago

The real mechanism of resistance is in how it inhibits cell wall synthesis. Plus there are general mechanisms such as drug efflux and prevention of drug entry into the cell.

See, it must be specific enough to not kill our cells, otherwise it is worthless.

gpvos2• 10 years ago

Does it also inhibit cell wall synthesis of non-bacteria cells? If yes, it's toxic to us. If no, bacteria cell walls could evolve to be more like non-bacteria cell walls in order to avoid this. Two links from the Wikipedia article on Teixobactin about this: http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/41850/... http://www.bbc.com/news/health-30657486 (Actually, Teixobactin only works on gram-positive bacteria, not on gram-negative ones which have an extra membrane.)

partycoder• 10 years ago

Discovery of teixobactin was announced in early 2015.

It was done using isolation chips to culture Eleftheria terrae (temporary name), a bacterium discovered in 2014.

srunni• 10 years ago

The original paper, from January 2015: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v517/n7535/full/nature1...

And a more easily comprehensible summary of it: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/01/08/tei...

The most interesting part of this is how the compound was discovered:

A multichannel device, the iChip, was used to simultaneously isolate and grow uncultured bacteria. A sample of soil is diluted so that approximately one bacterial cell is delivered to a given channel, after which the device is covered with two semi-permeable membranes and placed back in the soil. Diffusion of nutrients and growth factors through the chambers enables growth of uncultured bacteria in their natural environment. The growth recovery by this method approaches 50%, as compared to 1% of cells from soil that will grow on a nutrient Petri dish.

The iChip was originally described in an April 2010 paper (http://aem.asm.org/content/76/8/2445.long), and builds on earlier work from 2002 (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/296/5570/1127), along with advances in microfluidics.

owenfi• 10 years ago

Could antibiotics (especially anti-resistant antibiotics such as this) be used in a phased manner worldwide to help prevent resistant bacteria from gaining a foothold?

Say a couple similarly potent (a few vectors to kill bacteria) antibiotics are found in the next 20-30 years. If the WHO encouraged/mandated that drug A was prescribed for the first 10 years, B for the next, then C before going back to A could we "confuse" the bacteria?

_lbaq• 10 years ago

Great question, love to hear the answer on this !

iSnow3• 10 years ago

It would help. But when they are patented, the structure is in the open and anyone with good knowledge of synthesis can produce them, e.g. for treating livestock in China or for sale on the grey market in India.

Hondor• 10 years ago

Or for treating livestock, chest pains and flu symptoms in America. Don't forget you'd need the government on side and America's doesn't have a good track record of cooperating with the rest of the world for the global good.

wolfram742• 10 years ago

The theory is sound [1], but as in many situations with a lot of different actors, you get some coordination problems. Already many countries have some rules about how and when you can use certain anti-biotics, and some countries completely ignore them, or ignore them when it's profitable (farmers, usually, from what I gather.[2])

Even given the variety of anti-biotics we have now, if they were on a kind of 4 or 5 year rotation schedule that was actually followed, given the reproductive rate of bacteria i suspect that would work anyways, so hoping for coordination would certainly help, a solution that wouldn't require humans being more cooperative would be greatly expanding the diversity of our anti-biotics.

[1] http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/cellular-microscopic/d... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZbcwi7SfZE

ethbro• 10 years ago

Out of curiosity, is there a reason antibiotic cocktails aren't used more often? Cost?

Seems like it would be more productive and play to human nature if we could decrease the cost of cocktails and mandate that they're always used instead of singular antibiotics.

grizzles• 10 years ago

Unsung heroes. Our civilization seems to have an addiction to dancing on the edge of a cliff. Thanks to heroes like these, we can dance a little longer. At least until the hot coals get us.

chillydawg• 10 years ago

Dancing on the edge is the economically sensible thing to do. Same reason you only spend so much on earth quake resistance if they only happen once every 50 years. Let the whole city fall down and rebuild is cheaper than an earthquake tax on everything every year.

neffy• 10 years ago

A better idea is to have 2 cities - one built with earth quake resistance, and the other not - and give people the choice about which one to live in.

Then it shouldn't take more than a couple of earthquake iterations to sort out the gene pool.

The mistake you're making is to assume it's cheaper to build non-earthquake resistant structures. It's actually just another iteration of the cheap boot problem.[1]

[1] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-ri...

JulianMorrison2• 10 years ago

Why are we as a culture not putting much more effort into bacteriophage therapy? It was big in the USSR but seems to have been ignored by contemporary medicine, despite having at least two major advantages against resistance - physical mode of action, and being capable of evolution itself.

jessriedel3• 10 years ago

Bacteriophages are neat but we shouldn't pretend like it's totally surprising why they aren't used. For one, they are constantly evolving so it's very difficult to produce a well-defined stable bacteriophage. The version you test in clinical trials is often completely different from the one you'd get treated with a year later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy#Safety

But more importantly, your comment is off-topic.

JulianMorrison2• 10 years ago

Hardly off topic when talking about the dearth of new antibiotics.

As for constant evolution - just put known samples on ice? (I wonder if it would be possible to use DNA printing to load them with a tested genome?) Regardless though, they are unlikely to evolve towards uselessness, and they can't attack human cells, so, does it matter if they drifted some?

jnbiche• 10 years ago

But more importantly, your comment is off-topic.

I'm just curious, how is it that you see this comment as off-topic? I'm confused.

evgen• 10 years ago

Phages are much more targetted and specific than an antibiotic. They can be developed for specific bacterial targets (e.g. listeria, e.coli, etc) and they are in fact used in the food industry for such purposes, but this same specificity in bacterial targets also seems to mean that they are less applicable in general medical applications.

_pmf_• 10 years ago

Quick, to the pig troughs!

emn132• 10 years ago

I don't quite understand why this is news now. It's been amply published in academic and popular media (including tech-leaning places like http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/01/a-new-kind-of-antibio...). Has there been some new development?

Jean-Philipe• 10 years ago

The lack of new drugs coupled with over-prescribing has led to bacteria becoming increasingly resistant to modern medicines.

The article doesn't mention meat industry as the biggest consumer of antibiotics.

jbb555• 10 years ago

"could be available within five years."

Ah, the usual codeword for "this won't happen"

First new antibiotic in 30 years discovered in major breakthrough

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