New active ingredient could work against resistant bacteria
Published: Wednesday, Jan 3rd 2024, 17:20
العودة إلى البث المباشر
A new class of antibiotics has shown promising results against an antibiotic-resistant bacterium in initial studies. However, the drug candidate developed by researchers at the pharmaceutical company Roche in Basel is still a long way from being used in practice.
According to the study published in the journal "Nature" on Wednesday, this new antibiotic called zosurabalpine was effective in the laboratory and in mice against the antibiotic-resistant bacterium Acinetobacter baumannii - a typical hospital germ that can cause pneumonia, for example.
Antibiotic resistance has become an acute threat to health in recent decades, the researchers emphasized in the study. The bacterium targeted by the new active ingredient is particularly worrying. This is because it belongs to the so-called gram-negative bacteria, which are surrounded by inner and outer membranes that are difficult for most antibiotics to overcome. It repeatedly leads to outbreaks of infection in intensive care units around the world.
Phase 1 trials are currently underway
"More than 50 years have passed since the last independent class of antibiotics capable of treating infections caused by gram-negative bacteria was introduced," Michael Lobritz from Roche, who was involved in the study, told the Keystone-SDA news agency.
"Any new class of antibiotics that is able to treat infections caused by multidrug-resistant bacteria such as carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii would be a major breakthrough," says the researcher. However, further studies are needed to know whether zosurabalpine will bring about this breakthrough.
According to Roche, phase 1 clinical trials are currently underway to evaluate the safety, tolerability and pharmacology of the active substance in humans.
Attack on new target
Zosurabalpine belongs to a new chemical class of antibiotics, the so-called bound macrocyclic peptides. It attacks a novel target in bacteria, as Lobritz explained. As a result, bacteria have not yet had the opportunity to develop resistance mechanisms against this molecule.
Specifically, the active ingredient inhibits the transport of the molecule lipopolysaccharide (LPS) to the outer layer of the membrane of the bacteria. The inhibition of this transport causes LPS to accumulate to toxic levels within the cell, which ultimately leads to cell death.
"Promising"
In the study, zosurabalpine proved effective against more than 100 laboratory samples of the bacterium. It also significantly reduced bacterial levels in infected mice with pneumonia, according to the study.
"Given that zosurabalpine is already being tested in clinical trials, the future looks promising," wrote Paul Hegenrother and Morgan Gugger from the University of Illinois in the USA, who were not involved in the study, in a commentary on the study in the same journal.
©كيستون/إسدا
Arabic 
English 
German 
French 
Spanish