by: Giulia Pacchioni, PreScouter Global Scholar

One of the big worries of the modern world is that antibiotic resistance is spreading at a higher rate than the production rhythm of new compounds to fight bacteria.

Now a paper published in Nature brings a glimmer of hope that a new powerful antibiotic has been found. A team at Northeastern University developed an antibiotic that was extracted from soil bacteria, able to kill a huge range of microbes. No resistance has been detected, and even if genetic resistance is to come up in the future, scientists think it would take decades to emerge, probably even more than 30 years.

The team studied compounds from previously uncultured soil bacteria that up to now were considered unculturable because of difficult adaptation to Petri dish. To make bacteria grow they developed new bacterial cells that were buried in the ground to put the bacteria in a more natural setting.

The compound they discovered, teixobactin, is able to destroy bacterial cell walls. The treatment on mice has been demonstrated to be lethal on many bacteria, including highly dangerous ones such as Staphylococcus aureus and the bug responsible for Tuberculosis. Clinical trials could start already in two years from now.

A new round of the fight against bacteria could thus be won by scientists once again.

image courtesy of pixabay.com