Scientists have found a new way to defeat the drug resistance of superbugs
Last reviewed: 16.10.2021
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How to defeat an opponent who has acquired new effective protection mechanisms? Either develop more powerful weapons, or find a way to undermine his new clever security device. In the war against superbugs, it is the equivalent of developing new drugs or methods to increase their susceptibility to existing medicines.
Scientists have found a way to defeat drug-resistant bacteria, which have acquired an ingenious defense mechanism, the so-called "pumps". These pumps allow you to get rid of antibiotics in their bodies. A team of chemists from the University of Brown has found a way to block the "pumps" of bacteria, which again makes them vulnerable to antibiotics.
Dr. Jason K. Selho of Brown University in Providence, USA, and colleagues write about how they synthesized a new substance called BU-005 and used it to block the "pumps" that bacteria use to protect themselves from antibiotics, including the antibacterial agent chloramphenicol.
"Pumps" are proteins that are located in the walls of cells or membranes of bacteria. They identify and remove medications that break their membrane. In some cases, the "pumps" have become so perfect that they can recognize and exclude drugs with completely different structures and mechanisms.
"Drug resistance in clinical settings is a real problem, especially when the bacterial microorganism acquires a gene that codes for a" pump "that acts on several antibiotics.In the worst case scenario, a bacterium can acquire drug resistance to five or six different drugs, acquiring a single gene," - says Selo.
Jason Selo's research is not the first of its kind: many scientists have already tried to disarm drug-resistant bacteria by inactivating their "pumps." The problem is that different types of bacteria have different kinds of "pumps".
Scientists have discovered that a new class of compounds BU-005 called C-bound dipeptides can block the "pumps" of Gram-positive bacteria, including MRSA (Staphylococcus aureus) and tuberculosis. Prior to the discovery of Jason Selo, scientists believed that C-bound dipeptides are active only in relation to drug-pumping pumps of gram-negative bacteria.
The Selo team, by chemical modifications of C-bound dipeptides, found that substance BU-005 blocked the "pumps" of MFS in the bacterium Streptomyces coelicolor (a relative of human pathogenic Mycobacterium tuberculosis) that expel chloramphenicol, one of the strongest antibacterial drugs.
"It turned out that C-bound dipeptides block the channels of both gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria, which should strengthen the scientists' interest in these compounds," Cell said.
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