how are we fighting antibiotic resistant bacteria and what will we do when our antibiotics will no longer have effect?
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I am doing my PhD in making a new antibiotic!
That kind of gives one answer – we make antibiotics that have a new mode of action that the bacteria have not developed a resistance to.
Some research is going on to develop drugs that disable the resistance mechanism that bacteria have developed – a clinically used example is clavulinic acid thats disables the enzymes that would destroy the antibiotic amoxicillin.
Other research is going into bacteriophages, viruses that are specialised to only kill bacteria, these can be so specific that only certain species of bacteria are targeted which is much better than the carpet bombing approach of the more commonly used broad spectrum antibiotics. The idea is that you would be given a cocktail of bacteriophages that kill all the pathogens that you might have for a particular infection. The disadvantage of these is that they might not be able to get to certain parts of the body like the brain as, compared to an antibiotic molecule, viruses are huge and might not get past the blood brain barrier.
Lots of research is going into tracking resistance genes and using that information to tell doctors what antibiotic will most likely work in their geographical area.
I’ll leave it there otherwise I’ll end up writing a whole essay – feel free to ask me any questions though!
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