Scientists Develop Wonder Drug to Fight Superbugs

U.S. scientists have recently developed a wonder drug to fight antibiotic-resistant bacteria. They did this by re-engineering an already existing antibiotic called vancomycin to make it even more powerful and effective. It is said to be a thousand times stronger than the old drug but has yet to be tested on animals and humans.

Vancomycin has been prescribed by doctors for the past six decades, but the infections have developed resistance from the medication, making it powerless. The new wonder drug is referred to as the "antibiotic of last resort" as it treats serious infections when other medicines have failed.

Experts have repeatedly warned of a coming "post-antibiotic era" where some infections would become untreatable. England's chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies blamed decades of antibiotics overuse, as physicians hand them out too often which enabled the germs to mutate to a point that they no longer respond to medical treatment.

One such super bacterium is called Klebsiella, which has recently developed resistance to a powerful class of antibiotics called carbapenems. An American woman who caught the infection from India died as it cannot be treated with any of 26 different antibiotics available to the doctors.

But scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have made vancomycin more potent by introducing three modifications. This means the drug has three independent mechanisms of action to destroying cell walls. Even if one of the mechanisms fails, the bacteria could still be killed by the other two.

"[R]esistance to such an antibiotic would be very difficult to emerge. So it's a molecule designed specifically to address the emergence of resistance," lead researcher Dr. Dale Boger explained. "Organisms just can't simultaneously work to find a way around three independent mechanisms of action. Even if they found a solution to one of those, the organisms would still be killed by the other two," he added.