Every year, more than five million people die due to bacterial infections that are becoming increasingly resistant to a range of antibiotics. It is a concern the World Health Organization has identified as one of the three greatest threats to human health, making the need to develop new antibiotic drugs more urgent.
Researchers at Dalhousie and the University of Toronto, working with the pharmaceutical company DeNovaMed Inc., are addressing that threat head-on with the development of a new family of antibiotics to treat potentially lethal multidrug-resistant bacteria, which are predicted to continue to rise around the world.
They outlined their research in the journal, Nature Communications.
"The fact that this is a focused family of several antibiotics that have the potential to be delivered by different routes -- topical, oral and intravenous -- enables several different types of infection to be treated. Indeed, major multidrug-resistant bacteria that are causing this increase in death in humans are successfully killed by our new antibiotic family," says study co-author Dr. Christopher McMaster, scientific director of the CIHR Institute of Genetics, a professor of Pharmacology at Dal and president of DeNovaMed Inc.
The researchers say that early results have been successful in both in vitro and animal model testing, which involved a diabetic foot ulcer infection that are difficult to treat due to limited options.
Antimicrobial medicines are the cornerstone of modern medicine, so the spread of drug-resistant pathogens makes it more difficult to do everything from treating common infections to performing life-saving procedures, including many surgeries.
How it happens
Resistance to antibiotics occurs when bacteria evolve and become immune to the effects of these drugs. With the number of deaths associated with antimicrobial resistance rapidly rising each year, this narrowing of antibiotic options is leaving health-care providers with limited choices when treating infections.
The Dalhousie researchers, led by Dr. McMaster, used computer-aided drug design to develop the unique antibiotic family against the target AcpS, an enzyme that is essential for bacterial survival.
"This research presents a unique potential to bring new antibiotic treatments to market, with broad clinical application. The exhaustive article in Nature Communications serves as a testament to the significance of the breakthrough, and also provides third-party, scientific validation of the technology. By partnering with the DeNovaMed team, investors and pharmaceutical companies can take action to reduce the risk of future bacterial-based pandemics," says Z. Sam Ruttonsha, a director and chief business officer of DeNovaMed, a pharmaceutical company specializing in the development of novel antibiotics.
DeNovaMed says the next step is to raise funding to complete safety and toxicity work that will eventually enable a human trial. That could begin in about a-year-and-a-half if the team receives the required investment.
"With death from multidrug-resistant bacteria expected to increase substantially, the need to move more antibiotics into the clinic is now urgent," Dr. McMaster says.
