For all the good antibiotics do for the world, one of the biggest downsides to their use is the way they indiscriminately kill both the 'good' and the 'bad'. A single course of this life-saving medicine can not only destroy disease-causing invaders in the human body; it can also have an " " impact on the gut and its resident collection of microbes. This impact can sometimes lead to an overgrowth of certain bacteria or fungi.
For instance, women of developing a yeast infection after antibiotic treatment. Scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are working on a solution. They have discovered a new antibiotic, called lolamicin, that can hone in on gram-negative pathogens while leaving other microbes alone.
There's still a before the drug can be tested on humans, but researchers are hopeful it can serve as a blueprint for future antibiotic development. are common causes of infections in the bowels, lungs, bladder, and blood, and they are . Their resistance to current antibiotics is facing global human health today.
Broad-spectrum antibiotics can kill both gram-negative and . But scientists say there is a critical need to find medicine that can target gram-negative bacteria specifically, as they're more likely to be resistant to our current antibiotics. This gives more microbes that are useful to human health a chance of being spared.
A drug like lolamicin could be just the ticket. In , when lolamicin was pitted against 130 drug-resistant strains of common gra.
