New drug antibiotics resistant to pest

Antibiotics are often resistant to plague: New drugs give hope

16/01/2012

There are still hundreds of cases of plague every year. The antibiotics used to combat the „Black death“ partly no longer work. As early as 2010, two pestle strains from Madagascar were discovered in which antibiotics were completely ineffective. A German-American team of scientists has now found two new inhibitors that attack the pest.

Plague not extinct
Although the plague is linked to the consciousness of many people in the past century, it remains a dangerous, non-extinct infectious disease. Every year, several hundred plague cases are reported from Africa to the southwestern United States. In rare cases, the disease still leads to death today.

The cause of the highly contagious infectious disease is the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Patients are usually treated with antibiotics. However, similar to other infectious diseases, Yersinia pestis is also developing increasing antibiotic resistance. French scientists from the Pasteur Institute in Paris discovered two strains of pest strains in 2010 that made antibiotics ineffective. The two bacterial strains came from Madagascar, one of the centers of global pest outbreaks. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 313 cases of pests were reported there in 2010. 152 cases became known in Congo. In Peru, there were 27 diseases in the same year, according to WHO statistics.

Two new inhibitors against Pesterreger analyzed
A German-American team of scientists from the Universities of Würzburg and Stony Brook in the USA has now succeeded in analyzing the mechanism of action of two inhibitors that are active against the pester. The researchers present their results in the current issue of the journal "Structure".

Both inhibitors come from the group of pyridones. Their effect is based on the attachment to the bacterial enzyme FabV, making it harmless. The bacterial enzyme FabV is responsible for the last step in bacterial fatty acid production. However, it is blocked by the inhibitors. As a result, the Pesterreger dies, because this can not maintain its protective cell membrane without fatty acids.

Caroline Kisker from the Rudolf Virchow Center of the University of Würzburg reports: „But still, the two substances do not inhibit the enzyme well enough.“ Therefore, further analysis and investigation of the new inhibitors and their interactions with the enzyme is already in the planning stage.

Antibiotic resistance is increasing
In the case of plague and other serious diseases, the spread of antibiotic resistance has serious consequences. If an antibiotic no longer works against certain bacteria, they can even lead to the death of the patient as the disease progresses. Since the cause of the spread of antibiotic resistance - the ready-to-use, improper and sometimes unnecessary prescribing of antibiotics for patients and the massive use of the drug in animal production - can not be easily remedied, it is all the more important to have new substances against bacteria to explore. WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said last year that the world „to a post-antibiotic age“ as more and more pathogenic bacteria developed resistance to common antibiotics. (Ag)

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Picture credits: Cornelia Menichelli