A research team led by Scott Medina, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Penn State, has developed a small protein that can target a specific pathogen to attach to and destroy without harming good bacteria.
IMAGE: THE MEDINA GROUP/PENN STATE
Drug-resistant bacteria could lead to more deaths than cancer by 2050, according to a report commissioned by the United Kingdom in 2014 and jointly supported by the U.K. government and the Wellcome Trust.
In an effort to reduce the potential infection-caused 10 million deaths worldwide, Penn State researcher Scott Medina has developed a peptide, or small protein, that can target a specific pathogen without damaging the good bacteria that bolsters the immune system.
Medina, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering, led the team who published its results Jan. 4 in Nature Biomedical Engineering.
“One of the best protective mechanisms we have to prevent infection are beneficial bacteria that inhabit our bodies, known as commensals,” Medina said. “For example, we often avoid food poisoning because our guts are already populated by helpful bacteria. There’s no room for the pathogen to take hold and colonize. If you wipe out the good bacteria, opportunistic pathogens can take advantage and cause infections.”
Antibiotics can knock out an infection, but they can also kill off good bacteria, creating an opportunity for a potentially fatal secondary infection. Repeated exposure to antibiotics can also breed bacteria resistant to drugs. The potential for secondary infection and drug-resistant bacteria holds true for infections elsewhere in the body, too, according to Medina.
Led by biomedical engineering doctoral student Andrew W. Simonson, first author on the paper, the team set out to develop a peptide that could eradicate the pathogen that causes tuberculosis (TB), one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide, without harming surrounding good bacteria.
“There are great control strategies and treatments in place for tuberculosis, making it largely preventable and treatable, but drug-resistant TB is an emerging threat that is on track to becoming a serious global health problem,” Medina said. “It’s a scary prospect.”
To develop a pathogen-specific antibacterial against TB, the researchers looked to the pathogen itself. The TB pathogen is wrapped in a thick envelope that is difficult to penetrate, especially compared to other bacteria.
“The envelope has pores, though — channels through which the pathogen takes in nutrients and metabolites,” Medina said. “We asked if we could mimic these channels to design antibacterials that would create holes in the bacterial envelope, and ultimately kill the pathogen.”
The researchers made a peptide that seems to disrupt the protective outer coating of the pathogen, making the TB bacteria susceptible to antibiotics and die, but it does not interact with the good bacteria. Medina said they are currently studying the exact mechanism by which the peptide attacks the TB pathogen, but they suspect it has something to do with a fatty acid that lives on the pathogen’s surface.
“There aren’t many biochemical differences between the targeted pathogen and good bacteria, except for this surface lipid,” Medina said. “We think the interaction of our peptide with this fatty acid is one of the things driving this preferential interaction.”
He also pointed to the bacteria’s thin carbohydrate region. In other types of bacteria, the carbohydrates form a thick defensive barrier that appears to insulate the bacteria against the peptide.
“It’s not entirely clear why this works, but it’s working on TB,” Medina said. “There’s a 10-fold improvement on the effectiveness of antibiotics on this pathogen relative to the other good bacteria.”
Next, the researchers plan to investigate how to administer the peptide to treat TB in a full model system. Peptides tend to break down when injected, Medina said, so his team is working to develop an aerosol that would allow a person to inhale the peptides directly to the infected lung tissue.
“Once we understand why this peptide targets TB, and how to administer the peptide as a viable therapeutic, we can use this platform to design antibacterials toward other lung pathogens,” Medina said.
The Latest Updates from Bing News & Google News
Go deeper with Bing News on:
Drug resistant bacteria
- Chemicals working against superbug planon April 10, 2021 at 2:01 pm
the bacteria respond by getting tougher and more aggressive, ultimately becoming resistant to conventional therapies like antibiotics," Trevor Lithgow from Monash University told AAP. The WHO predicts ...
- Compounds in Amber Could Help Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria Superbugs, Scientists Findon April 8, 2021 at 9:05 am
“We have now extracted and identified several compounds in Baltic amber that show activity against gram-positive, antibiotic-resistant bacteria.” Ambrose’s interest originally stemmed from her Baltic ...
- Prospective multicenter study on the incidence of surgical site infection after emergency abdominal surgery in Chinaon April 7, 2021 at 5:00 pm
There is still a lack of relevant studies on surgical site infection (SSI) after emergency abdominal surgery (EAS) in China. This study aims to understand the incidence of SSI after EAS in China and ...
- New formulation of existing medicines prove highly effective against drug-resistant funguson April 7, 2021 at 1:25 am
A team of researchers from Case Western Reserve University has discovered a formulation of existing medicines that can significantly reduce the presence of the fungus Candida auris (C. auris) on skin, ...
- Drugs Repurposed To Tap Immune System In Fight Against Pathogenson April 5, 2021 at 10:02 pm
Bacteria produce disease both by resisting immune clearance ... health outcomes—from allergies and chronic diseases like obesity and diabetes to the drug-resistant pathogen C. diff. “Sometimes the ...
Go deeper with Google Headlines on:
Drug resistant bacteria
Go deeper with Bing News on:
Pathogen-specific antibacterial
- Nuubu Reviews – Detox Foot Pads – Product Review by ProductWorldon April 8, 2021 at 3:26 pm
New York, NY , April 08, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- What is Nuubu? Nuubu is a detox foot pad that is offered on the global market by a Lithuanian company. The patch is applied directly to the foot ...
- Immunomodulatory Effects of Antimicrobial Agents. Part Ion March 25, 2021 at 5:00 pm
Therapeutic applications of the immunomodulatory properties of various antibacterial drugs are ... available antiviral drugs are highly pathogen-specific. Compounds with broad-spectrum antiviral ...
- BCG vaccination–induced emergency granulopoiesis provides rapid protection from neonatal sepsison March 16, 2021 at 5:00 pm
This poses considerable difficulty in providing protection from neonatal sepsis through pathogen-specific vaccination. A pathogen-agnostic approach to broadly protect from neonatal sepsis is urgently ...
- What is an antigen?on October 6, 2020 at 8:29 pm
In the endogenous pathway, MHC class I molecules present endogenous antigens that are derived from pathogen-specific proteins produced within infected cells. However, in the exogenous pathway ...
- Proteasome target to tackle non-replicating TBon April 30, 2019 at 9:25 am
tuberculosis proteasome contains only one type of β-subunit, in contrast to the seven types of β-subunit in the mammalian proteasome, providing encouragement that pathogen-specific targeting ...