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A team of researchers led by Brown University infectious disease experts and engineers has identified a new class of antibiotics that could kill drug-resistant “superbugs.” A professor of infectious diseases at Brown’s Warren Alpert Medical School and chief of infectious diseases at Rhode Island Hospital and the Miriam Hospital, Eleftherios Mylonakis led a multidisciplinary team of researchers searching for drugs to target bacteria that have developed a resistance to conventional antibiotics.
Their research led to the identification of two synthetic retinoids, both of which demonstrated the ability to kill MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), a type of staph bacteria that is resistant to several antibiotics. It takes the bugs an average of two years to develop resistance to antibiotics. It takes more than 10 to 15 years of work to get an antibiotic into clinical practice.
Drug-resistant staphylococcus is of great concern because it’s omnipresent in the environment and on skin, it is highly virulent and can cause serious blood, bone and organ infections.It affects individuals in the hospital, the very old and everybody. Researchers developed novel ways to screen a remarkable 82,000 synthetic compounds to identify those that would serve as effective antibiotics but not be toxic to humans.
Ultimately, 85 compounds were identified that decreased the ability of MRSA to kill laboratory roundworms. Of those, two, both synthetic retinoids, were selected. Sophisticated computer modeling and other studies showed that retinoids impair bacterial membranes. Moreover, these compounds kill so-called MRSA “persister” cells that are drug-resistant dormant cells that are not susceptible to current antibiotic therapies.
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