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April 1 (UPI) -- Swedish scientists have made a breakthrough in combating the global rise in microbial resistance to antibiotics with the discovery of a potent new class of drugs, according to new research published Monday. The new family of antibiotics the team at Uppsala University found works against multi-drug resistant bacteria, with synthetic trials showing they are effective against bloodstream infections in mice, the university said in a news release.
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In their paper published in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists, the researchers detail a never previously used class of compounds that target a pathway protein that some resistant Gram-negative bacteria, such as E-coli and pneumoniae, use to synthesize their outermost barrier to external pathogens.
The World Health Organization has designated bacteria with this so-called LpxH layer as being the most critically important for developing new therapies to combat antibiotic resistance.
The researchers were able to show that their new antibiotic class is highly active against multidrug-resistant bacteria, proving its efficacy by curing bloodstream infections in a mouse model.
The scientists believe the wider promise lies in the combination of a completely new compound class acting on a previously unexploited protein target because the bacteria have zero pre-existing resistance to the drugs.
"This is in contrast to the many 'me-too' antibiotics of existing classes currently in clinical development. While the current results are very promising, there will be considerable additional work required before compounds of this class will be ready for clinical trials," the university said.
With rising resistance to antibiotics threatening their ability to treat or prevent bacterial infections in every area of medicine from oncology, surgery and transplants to preterm babies and their mothers, development of novel therapeutics to which there is no existing resistance is critical, according to the scientists.
Co-led by GlaxoSmithKline, the seven-year project was supported by the European Union's ENABLE academia-industry partnership, funded through the Innovative Medicines Initiative's "New Drugs 4 Bad Bugs" program.
ENABLE is a collaborative effort of more than 50 stakeholders from across Europe, representing academia and large and small pharmaceutical companies, to pool resources and expertise to advance early-stage antibiotic development.
The work on the new drug compound will now be taken up by ENABLE-2, an antibiotic drug discovery platform funded by the Swedish Research Council, the National Research Program on Antibiotic Resistance and Sweden's innovation agency, Vinnova, "to continue the momentum generated by the original ENABLE project."
