Potential new class of antibiotics found in old drug

Date: Sep-23-2014New research by scientists from Canada and the US suggests an existing anticonvulsant drug

called lamotrigine may lead to a new class of antibiotics.

Superbug infections often do not respond to common antibiotics, resulting in prolonged illness and higher risk of death.

The team, from McMaster University in Hamilton, ON, and The Scripps Research Institute, La

Jolla, CA, report their findings in the open access journal eLife.

The World Health

Organization have declared antibiotic resistance a major threat to global health and that

without effective antimicrobial drugs, many standard medical treatments will fail or turn into very

high-risk procedures.

Infections caused by drug-resistant microbes, or "superbugs," often fail to respond to commonly used antibiotics, resulting in prolonged illness, higher medical costs and greater risk of

death.

For example, the UN health agency estimates that people infected with the drug-resistant

bacterium MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), are 64% more likely to die

than people with a non-resistant form of the infection.

In the US, at least 2 million people develop superbug infections, and at least 23,000

people die each year as a direct result of them, say the Centers for Disease Control and

Prevention (CDC).

Drug stops assembly of protein-making machinery in bacteria

Most antibiotics target a vital process in bacteria - for example, to stop them replicating or

making essential proteins.

In this new study, the team found that an old drug called lamotrigine can prevent

bacteria from being able to assemble ribosomes, the machinery that bacteria use to make

proteins.

Lamotrigine, marketed in most of the world as Lamictal (by GlaxoSmithKline), is an

anticonvulsant drug, also effective as a mood stabilizer, that is used in the treatment of epilepsy

and bipolar disorder.

The study is the first to show that a drug can inhibit the assembly of ribosomes in bacteria.

Many antibiotics are effective because they attack what ribosomes do, but this is the first

demonstration of a drug being able to prevent the ribosomes being created in the first place.

New class of antibiotics

Principal investigator Eric Brown, a professor of biochemistry and biomedical sciences at

McMaster's, says:

"Ribosome-inhibiting antibiotics have been routinely used for more than 50 years to treat

bacterial infections, but inhibitors of bacterial ribosome assembly have waited to be

discovered."

"Such molecules would be an entirely new class of antibiotics, which would get around antibiotic

resistance of many bacteria. We found lamotrigine works," he adds.

In their paper, the researchers also describe how they identified the exact place in the

bacterial cell that the drug targets. This helped them better understand how ribosomes assemble and

the biochemistry of how to attack the process with drugs.

Meanwhile, Medical News Today recently learned how researchers in Sweden discovered honeybees contain bacteria with strong antimicrobial properties -

including the ability to fight MRSA.

Written by Catharine Paddock PhD

View all articles written by Catharine, or follow her on:

Courtesy: Medical News Today Note: Any medical information available in this news section is not intended as a substitute for informed medical advice and you should not take any action before consulting with a health care professional.