A new experimental antibiotic can handily knock off one of the world's most notoriously drug-resistant and deadly bacteria —in lab dishes and mice, at least. It does so with a never-before-seen method, cracking open an entirely new class of drugs that could yield more desperately needed new therapies for fighting drug-resistant infections.
The findings appeared this week in a pair of papers published in Nature, which lay out the extensive drug development work conducted by researchers at Harvard University and the Swiss-based pharmaceutical company Roche.
In an accompanying commentary, chemists Morgan Gugger and Paul Hergenrother of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign discussed the findings with optimism, noting that it has been more than 50 years since the Food and Drug Administration has approved a new class of antibiotics against the category of bacteria the drug targets: Gram-negative bacteria. This category—which includes gut pathogens such as E. coli, Salmonella, Shigella, and the bacteria that cause chlamydia, the bubonic plague, gonorrhea, whooping cough, cholera, and typhoid, to name a few—is extraordinarily challenging to kill because it's defined by having a complex membrane structure that blocks most drugs, and it's good at accumulating other drug-resistance strategies
The Food and Drug Administration is warning health care providers not to use probiotics containing live bacteria or yeast in preterm infants after the agency began investigating the July death of a preterm, low-weight infant given such a product in an unnamed hospital.
The infant developed sepsis from the bacterium in the probiotic product—Evivo with MCT Oil made by Infinant Health—and subsequently died.
In a statement to Ars, the FDA said it quickly investigated the death after receiving an initial report on July 31. "Infant deaths are especially tragic and determining causality of preterm infant death can be particularly complicated," an agency spokesperson said. The agency reviewed medical records and laboratory tests from the case and collected clinical samples and product samples for analysis.