MRSA can be combated with new method – Today’s Medicine

– It looks promising, but we’ll see how fast they develop resistance again, says Linus Sandgren, associate professor and senior lecturer in medical bacteriology at Uppsala University.

There is a researcher at an American laboratory of the pharmaceutical giant Merck who has managed to make methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, MRSA, sensitive to antibiotics again, writes Läkemedelsvärlden. The study is published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

It’s about lactam, the group that half of all antibiotics in the world belongs. The researchers managed to reactivate the antibiotic by providing it with two chemical substances.

– lactam antibiotics inhibit the production of the cell wall of the bacteria so that they simply grow until they burst. It has MRSA bacteria managed to get away. But now they have sights set on another part of the cell wall synthesis and hit it out, says Linus Sandgren.

– This is a completely new mechanism that they have found, which means that there is less risk that there is already bacteria that are resistant.

that it is precisely researcher at a large pharmaceutical company has published the discovery will increase the chances that it can actually result in a preparation that can reach the market. Linus Sandgren also believe that scientists “have more” than they go out with the scientific paper.

First, remains years of clinical trials. And despite the promising results, the discovery is not a solution to the problem of multi-drug resistant bacteria. In the study, the researchers write that the bacteria become resistant again.

– It is something that can put a spoke in the wheel. There is always a balance of pharmaceutical companies. If they see that they can use it for a very short time for the bacteria quickly become resistant so they will not go into a clinical trial and burn money, says Linus Sandgren.

The war against resistant bacteria can never overcome. Each time scientists find out something new, you will find the bacteria on an antidote.

– If we look at what the bacteria have developed over the 75 years we’ve used antibiotics, they have found the antidote to just about everything. They will develop resistance to all, which means that we must constantly produce new antibiotics. We are not doing right now and that’s why we’re sitting in the seat problems we do, says Linus Sandgren.

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