Researchers have developed a new antibiotic that kills bad bacteria, but spares healthy gut bacteria. The drug, called lolamicin, also warded off secondary infections with Clostridioides difficile (C. difficile), a common and dangerous hospital-associated bacterial infection.
According to the study in mice, the antibiotic was effective against more than 130 multidrug-resistant bacterial strains. Previous research has suggested that common antibiotics can disturb gut microbiome (bacteria), increase vulnerability to further infections and are associated with gastrointestinal, kidney, liver and other problems. Professor Paul Hergenrother, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, US, said: “People are starting to realise that the antibiotics we’ve all been taking — that are fighting infection and, in some instances, saving our lives — also are having these deleterious effects on us.
They’re killing our good bacteria as they treat the infection. We wanted to start thinking about the next generation of antibiotics that could be developed to kill the pathogenic bacteria and not the beneficial ones.” To tackle the issues associated with indiscriminately targeting gram-negative bacteria – those that are resistant to antibiotics – the researchers focused on a suite of drugs developed by the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.
These drugs inhibit a specific system that is exclusive to gram-negative bacteria and genetically different in pathogenic and beneficial microbes..
