A new class of antibiotics able to fight antibiotic resistant bacteria that escape common treatments. The result was achieved by a group of researchers from the American Wistar Institute, led in the undertaking by experts Farokh Dotiwala and Joseph Salvino. The new class of antibiotics has a dual action: on the one hand it affects microorganisms and on the other activates the immune defenses. In particular, drugs interfere with a metabolic process common in different types of pathogenic bacteria and necessary for their survival. The results obtained were described in the journal Nature.
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The creation of the new antibiotics
deepening
Superbacteria, secret of antibiotic resistance discovered
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With the aid of computer models, researchers have examined millions of molecules to find the most effective in blocking a specific metabolic enzyme. bacterial. Later they made a modified version in the laboratory, able to penetrate the cell wall of microorganisms. “We have adopted a creative and twofold strategy to develop new molecules capable, on the one hand, of killing drug-resistant bacteria and, on the other hand, of enhancing the host’s natural immune response,” explains Dotiwala. “We thought, in fact, that exploiting the immune system to attack bacteria on two different fronts simultaneously could make it difficult to develop resistance mechanisms”, concludes the expert.
The enzyme IspH
The target that the new class of antibiotics “attack” is a metabolic pathway known as methyl-D-erythrol phosphate (MEP) or the non-mevalonate pathway. In the battery Gram-negative, in mycobacteria and Apicomplexa, this metabolic pathway is responsible for the biosynthesis of isoprenoids, the fundamental molecules for the survival of microorganisms. The enzyme responsible for their synthesis, known as IspH, is the real “target” of the new drugs. Unlike common antibiotics, Isph inhibitors developed by the Wistar Institute can effectively penetrate the bacterial membrane.
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