Antimicrobial Resistance:Searching for clues to fight antibiotic resistance






To conflict the rise of drug-resistant bacteria, researchers are developing how one superbug bacteria adapts to fight with an antibiotic of last resort, hoping to find clues that can lengthen the drug's effectiveness.
Researchers at Rice University and the University Of Texas Health Science Centre at Houston ran experiments to track the biochemical changes that vancomycin-resistant Enterococci (VRE) underwent as they adapted to fight another antibiotic, daptomycin.
"We need to get to a platform where we can anticipate how these pathogens will become resistant to antibiotics so we can stay one step ahead of them," said Rice biochemist Youssef Shampoo, co-author of a study in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy that found VRE can develop resistance to daptomycin in more than one way.
The stakes are high. In 2014, the World Health Organization reported that antibiotic-resistant infections were on pace to kill 10 million people per year worldwide by 2050.
According to the U.S. Centres for Disease Control, VRE is one of the nation's leading antibiotic resistance threats. The Centres for Disease control estimated Vancomycin Resistant Enterococci will infect some 30,000 people in the U.S. this year and kill 2,300 of them.
Daptomycin, an antibiotic that first became available in 2003, is one of the last drugs doctors can use to fight multidrug-resistant superbugs like VRE, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and glycopeptide-resistant enterococci (GRE).
Unfortunately, health officials documented cases of daptomycin resistance as early as 2005, and the number of cases is on the rise worldwide.
Shampoo said one of the principle findings of the study was that a specific strain of VRE, Enterococcus faecium, has an unusually diverse set of strategies for resisting antibiotics like daptomycin, and that diversity can make treatment of infections even more difficult.
It is believed that by understanding how these pathogens acquire resistance, we can produce advanced treatment strategies or new 'co-drugs' that target their ability to become resistant.
Co-drugs that target the evolution of resistance could be administered with antibiotics like daptomycin which help patients fight off infection and stem the spread of increasingly resistant strains of bacteria in hospitals.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Petting zoos transmit Virulent drug-resistant bacteria to visitors

Image
Human infectious diseases :  Petting zoos transmit Virulent drug-resistant bacteria to visitors Petting zoos are a popular attraction around the world, allowing direct and indirect exposure of both children and adults to a diverse range of animal species. They are different from regular zoos because rather than visitors just looking at the animals, petting zoos are interactive with children visiting, holding and petting the animals. Extended spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) and AmpC-producing Enterobacteriaceae (AmpC-E), which are resistant to a number of commonly used antibiotics, have become a matter of great concern in both human and veterinary medicine, so understanding the likelihood of them colonizing the animals is critical to evaluating the risk that may be posed to visitors. The researchers did a survey across randomly chosen petting zoos geographically distributed throughout the world, taking samples of faecal matter as well as from the body surface (skin, fur, or ...
Read more

How to block new antibiotic resistance gene???

Image
A new antimicrobial-resistance gene, VCC-1, a ß-lactamase gene, has been discovered in benign close relatives of virulent Vibrio cholerae, which causes cholera. Now, researchers have found a way to block the VCC-1 enzyme, which disables that resistance gene. The research is published in the journal Antimicrobial agents & chemotherapy . VCC-1 was first found in Canada, by investigators from the Public Health Agency of Canada, on frozen shrimp that had been imported from India, and sold in a Canadian grocery store. A handful of other ß-lactamase resistance genes have also emerged from India. ß-lactamase genes code for enzymes that can break down ß-lactams, which are a critically important class of antimicrobials . The researchers identified the gene in a non-toxigenic strain of Vibrio cholerae. Since then, VCC-1 has also been found in non-toxigenic V. cholerae off of the German coastline. The danger is that it's a short jump for a gene from non-toxigenic V. cholerae to...
Read more

How the mode of delivery plays key role in shaping the child's skin microbiome?

Image
Microbial Virulence : Key roles in shaping the child's skin microbiome.. The maturation of skin microbial communities during childhood is important for the skin of the children and development of the immune system into adulthood, but only a few studies have analyzed the presence of microbiota in young children. Recently investigators in China found that bacterial genera in children were more similar to those of their own mothers than to those of unrelated women. They suggest that the mode of delivery at birth could be an important factor in shaping the child's microbiome. To date, research into the maternal influence on her child's skin microbiome has been mostly limited to a narrow postpartum window in children younger than one year old and fewer studies have explored the maternal relationship with the child's microflora after infancy explained by chinese investigators. Therefore, we expanded the scope of our analysis to include sampling from different bod...
Read more