The Dirty Little Secret That May Lead to New Antibiotics
Published at
Sergiy Tryapitsyn/iStock/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — There’s a growing list of superbugs that antibiotics are barely keeping up with — MRSA, C.difficile and tuberculosis — and some are even untreatable, but a recent study has revealed that scientists may have found new antibiotics to potentially save thousands of lives, in of all places dirt.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, two million people get infected by resistant bacteria and 23,000 die yearly.
Researchers have not found a new type of antibiotic since 1987.
Most antibiotics are derived from natural chemicals that microbes produce to fight other microbes.
Between 1940 and 1960, antibiotics were discovered by looking for these chemicals. Eventually, new drug discovery ground to a halt because all the microbes that could be grown in a laboratory had been tested and researchers could not find a way to get the billions of other bacteria to grow in a lab — they’d only grow in soil.
A study published in the journal Nature Wednesday says that has changed.
In the study, researchers at Northeastern University in Boston said they not only found a new method that gets thousands of these microbes that only grow in soil to grow in a laboratory, but they also said that some of these microbes looked like they may make antibiotics.
One of them in particular called Teixobactin seemed to stand out as a new weapon — at least in their studies in mice — that could kill superbugs.
According to researchers, tests used in the study could be done on humans in three to five years, if the research and its findings pan out.
Follow @ABCNewsRadio
Copyright © 2015, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.