A new hero has been discovered in the form of an antibiotic, ready to take on one of the greatest bacterial threats to human health: drug-resistant bacteria.
Currently undergoing clinical trials, the drug has already shown promise in both laboratory and mice experiments.
If the clinical trials go well, the drug named zosurabalpin could soon be a potential solution for some Gram-negative bacterial strains.
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The research team, led by Claudia Zampaloni, Patrizio Mattei, Konrad Bleicher, and colleagues, have demonstrated that zosurabalpin is effective in targeting the carbapenem-resistant strain of the bacterium Acinetobacter baumannii, also known as CRAB.
CRAB poses a significant challenge in the world of antibiotics.
Classified as a priority 1 critical pathogen by the World Health Organization, it's notorious for its resistance to nearly all existing antibiotics.
What makes it even more dangerous is its ability to share its resistant genes with other bacteria, making them equally formidable.
The bacterium is particularly problematic in healthcare settings, posing a high risk to individuals with medical devices like catheters, those in intensive care, long-term hospital patients, and those recovering from surgical wounds.
Infections with CRAB are extremely hard to treat. The main reason is that, being a Gram-negative bacteria, it has an outer membrane that acts as a shield. It's made up of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) which need to be targeted if there's any hope of destroying the bacterium,
A lot of antibiotics fail to do this, reflecting the urgent need for new drugs like zosurabalpin.
Kenneth Bradley, global head, Infectious Disease Discovery at Roche Pharma Research & Early Development, explained: 'Surprisingly, this new class of antibiotics binds both to the transport complex as well as the LPS itself, preventing its transport to the outer membrane.
'Consequently, the LPS remains trapped in the inner membrane complex. Without the ability to transport LPS, the bacteria die.'
This breakthrough drug may also offer novel treatments against other Gram-negative pathogens that target the LPS transport system.
For example, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, another Gram-negative bacterium, caused around 32,600 hospital-acquired infections in 2017 and is increasingly difficult to treat.
In one Nature article, Morgan K. Gugger and Paul J. Hergenrother pointed out that it's been over half a century since the US Food and Drug Administration approved a new antibiotic for harmful Gram-negative bacteria.
So, it's been a long time coming.
However, scientists stress that further research is necessary for the risk that the bacteria might eventually develop resistance to zosurabalpin as well.