Teixobactin
Teixobactin is a newly discovered antibiotic, announced in January 2015 by researchers at Northeastern University, representing a significant advancement in the battle against antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Unlike many antibiotics developed synthetically in labs, teixobactin is derived from a natural source, specifically from the soil-dwelling microbe Eleftheria terrae. This discovery is particularly important given the ongoing global crisis of antibiotic resistance, which results in hundreds of thousands of deaths annually. Teixobactin operates by targeting key molecules essential for bacterial cell wall construction, which may reduce the likelihood of resistance developing quickly.
The isolation of teixobactin was made possible through the innovative use of a device called the isolation chip (iChip), allowing scientists to uncover previously unreachable natural antibiotics. This breakthrough has sparked optimism in the scientific community, promising a new class of antibiotics that may remain effective for longer durations against resistant strains. Although clinical trials are still in the planning stages, initial studies have shown that bacteria exposed to teixobactin did not develop resistance, a promising indicator for future treatments. The financial commitment to research and development in this area reflects the urgent need for new antibiotics in an era where many existing treatments are becoming ineffective.
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Teixobactin
In January 2015, an international team of researchers, centered at Boston’s Northeastern University and sponsored by several major pharmaceutical companies, announced that it had successfully isolated and identified a new strain of antibiotics. This antibiotic had not been produced synthetically in a lab, but rather collected organically, and thus represented an entirely new generation of natural antibiotics. Similar research done at the same time in Germany confirmed the findings.
This antibiotic breakthrough would help address one of the most pressing problems that had faced biomedicine since the 1970s: the resistance bacteria inevitably develop to antibiotics designed to eliminate or at least contain the damage such microorganisms can do to the body. The new antibiotic, named teixobactin, was the first entirely new strain of natural antibiotic in nearly thirty years. Although researchers point out that developing a usable and cost-effective antibiotic from this strain will take years of clinical trial studies on both animals and humans (the earliest results are projected for 2019), it is a promising advance in microbiology.
Background
Since penicillin’s development, antibiotics have been the primary agent for fighting bacterial infections leading to diseases such as tuberculosis and cholera and for keeping wounds clean. Scientists had known more than a century before Alexander Fleming that the natural soil teemed with naturally produced antibiotics, micromolecular agents that could contain and even control bacterial growth. The problem was in isolating these agents. Once researchers had figured out a process of extrication (even though, even as that process developed, scientists recognized that more than 90 percent of the available antibiotics remained unreachable), antibiotics revolutionized health care.
But the problem with natural antibiotics became apparent during World War II, when massive applications of available antibiotics were used to help fight infections, wounds, and burns in both soldiers and civilians. Because the agents were naturally produced, the bacteria would naturally, over time, develop immunity or resistance to the effects of the antibiotics. For more than twenty years, biomedical researchers using the same technology crafted artificial antibiotics in the lab to widen the range of effective treatments. The process was time-consuming and expensive, and the results narrow. By 1980, artificially generated antibiotics represented a small fraction of available antibiotics. Even then, bacteria began evolving resistance to synthetically produced antibiotics. In fact, research began to indicate that bacteria developed a resistance to the newest strains of artificially generated antibiotics almost as quickly as researchers could develop promising new strains. By the 1980s, concerns were quietly being raised over the possibility that a relatively minor infection introduced into the population at large could create a catastrophic public health crisis as the antibiotics available would prove ultimately ineffective and creating a new antibiotic strain would take years. Putting research money into antibiotic research seemed ill-advised, as resistance was inevitable and quickly made new antibiotics obsolete. By 2015, annual deaths due to antibiotic resistance were estimated at 700,000 worldwide and 23,000 in the United States alone.
Teixobactin Today
Beginning in the mid-1990s, the revolution in available computer technology offered a possible solution to what had appeared to be an irresolvable dilemma in antibiotic research. Suddenly researchers had available to them remarkably sensitive tools that were far more accurate and far more comprehensive than the tools that had been available just a few years earlier. Specifically, researchers took advantage of a device known as the isolation chip or iChip, which, like the electron microscope more than seventy years earlier, opened up the molecular world to new scrutiny and far more precise investigation. The iChip enabled antibiotic researchers to isolate and identify with unprecedented precision the abundance of uncultured molecular antibiotic material available in nature. From this material, an entire generation of truly new organic antibiotics could be developed. Researchers are optimistic that bacteria will take decades, rather than years, to develop resistances to these new medications. During their investigation, they exposed bacteria to low levels of teixobactin over the course of several weeks to see if any of the bacteria would develop a resistance, but none did. This is theorized to be because of the particular way that teixobactin works. The antibiotic withholds two kinds of molecules: lipid II, which bacteria use to construct their cell walls, and lipid III, which keeps existing walls intact. More importantly, it adheres to parts of those molecules that are consistent across different species of bacteria, meaning that those parts probably cannot be easily altered in order to avoid teixobactin’s effects. In addition, the microbe from which teixobactin is derived, Eleftheria terrae, has an extra membrane around its cell wall that makes it impervious to the antibiotic, and thus has not had to develop any other measures to defuse it. Often the mutations that make bacteria resistant to antibiotics originate with the microbe that produces the antibiotic, but E. terrae has no defense mechanism that other bacteria can copy. Its essential structure is simply different from that of the bacteria that teixobactin is effective against, which include those that cause MRSA, tuberculosis, and pneumonia.
The announcement of the identification of teixobactin—even if researchers did not offer a specific market-ready drug—was enough to bring new hope to the field of antibiotics. With the 2015 announcement, researchers also announced an unprecedented effort to move the newly isolated antibiotic through the process of testing and licensing, pledging more than $100 million to the effort, an unprecedented commitment to a single biomedical breakthrough. The medical science community is also hopeful that the iChip can be used to discover still more naturally occurring antibiotics with the ability to evade resistances.
Bibliography
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