Cresomycin, an innovative compound, has shown promising results against strains of bacteria resistant to currently available drugs, News.ro reports.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) occurs when bacteria evolve in a way that makes traditional antibiotics ineffective against them.

This phenomenon has led to the fact that many existing medicines become obsolete, which poses a significant threat to public health around the world.

Harvard University researchers have created a potential “new weapon” to fight superbugs.

The team’s synthetic molecule proved highly effective against drug-resistant bacteria.

Laboratory studies have shown that a synthetic compound, cresomycin, destroys numerous strains of drug-resistant bacteria, including notorious pathogens such as Staphylococcus aureus several diseases) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (pyocyanin bacillus), another dangerous and difficult-to-treat pathogen that is the most common among the bacteria found in hospitals, often involved in so-called nosocomial infections – infections associated with medical care.

The study was published Thursday in the journal Science.

“Although we do not yet know whether cresomycin and similar drugs are safe and effective in humans, our results show significantly improved inhibitory activity against a long list of pathogenic bacterial strains that kill more than a million people each year compared to clinical antibiotics. approved,” said the press release of the university author of the study, Andrew Myers, professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University.

Cresomycin is distinguished by its ability to bind more effectively to bacterial ribosomes – molecular mechanisms inside cells that produce proteins.

Many antibiotics target these ribosomes, but bacteria have evolved defense mechanisms that protect their ribosomes from such drugs.

The cresomycin concept overcomes this defense, offering a new approach to antibiotic therapy.

The antibiotic is part of a larger effort by the Harvard team to create compounds that can fight superbugs that have developed resistance to many antibiotics.

Their work is supported by a $1.2 million grant from the Biopharmaceutical Accelerator for Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria (CARB-X), a global nonprofit partnership based at Boston University that funds early-stage research and development of antibacterial products.

How deadly are antibiotic-resistant superbugs?

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections occur each year.

These infections killed at least 1.27 million people worldwide and were associated with nearly 5 million additional deaths in 2019.

Drawing inspiration from the lincosamides – a class of antibiotics that includes the widely used drug clindamycin – cresomycin is fully synthetic and exhibits chemical changes that cannot be achieved using traditional drug manufacturing processes.

This innovative approach makes it possible to create antibiotics that can go beyond current treatment methods.

The development of cresomycin involved a technique called component synthesis, a method that allows the creation of complex molecules by assembling large, equally complex components in successive steps of synthesis.

This strategy, compared to building from prefab sections from a Lego set, allows hundreds of potential drug candidates to be rapidly manufactured and tested, speeding up the drug discovery process.

“Antibiotics are the foundation on which modern medicine is built,” said study co-author Calvin Wu, a graduate student at Harvard University.

“Many advanced medical procedures, such as surgery, cancer treatment and organ transplants, cannot be performed without antibiotics,” he notes.

The research received support from various sources, including the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation and the Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator at Harvard. (News.ro)