Researchers in the Boston University College of Engineering have found a way to break down the defenses of some deadly bacteria usually immune to antibiotics.
The bacterial infections — called superbugs — develop when an overdose of antibiotics enter the body. If the drug-resistant bugs are not treated, they have the potential to destroy the body they inhabit.
The superbugs’ defense prevents them from being destroyed by unstable molecules — called free radicals — that kill bacteria. The biomedical researchers’ technique is considered a breakthrough because it uses conventional antibiotics to break down those barriers, said College of Engineering graduate student Michael Kohanski, who co-wrote the study.
“They are often very difficult to cure, and there are quite a few bacterial strains that are resistant to multiple antibiotics,” Kohanski said in an email. “We want to create super antibiotics that can eliminate bacterial infections with much greater efficiency.”
The findings were published in the Sept. 6 online issue of Cell magazine. Researchers hope the discovery will help curb large doses of antibiotics, which can release unnecessary free radicals into the body. The goal instead is to use antibiotics to penetrate the superbug once the defense shield is broken.
“We hope to use this new common killing pathway to find targets that we can inhibit, such as the one we found which increased killing by reducing the DNA damage response, which will make current antibiotics much more efficient,” Kohanski said.
Kohanski worked with biomedical engineering professor James Collins and BU graduate students Dan Dwyer, Boris Hayete and Carrie Lawrence, who hope if the new pathway proves to be successful in humans, “antibiotic-resistant bacteria could be limited,” according to a Sept. 6 university press release.
However, because the team only recently noticed that free radicals in antibiotics can be used to break the superbugs’ defense, their research is not relevant in a pharmaceutical setting, and only animals have been tested, so far.
“I don’t want to put a specific time on how long it will take for this work to be applied in a pharma setting, because things like that tend to be somewhat fluid,” Kohanski said. “I do hope, though, that there will be some interesting new combination drug therapies moving through clinical trials within the next five to 11 years.”