New Test Reveals Existing Antibiotics, Hidden in Plain Sight on Pharmacy Shelves, Can Treat Superbugs — ScienceDaily

The research has significant implications in the fight against bacterial resistance by optimizing the prescribing and use of currently available antibiotics and enhancing efforts to discover new ones.

Developed by a research team of UC Santa Barbara scientists, the antibiotic study was published in the journal Cellular reports Medicine. The research addressed a fundamental flaw in the healthcare paradigm for determining antibiotic resistance. It does not take into account environmental conditions in the body that affect the potency of the drug.

By simulating conditions in the body, the new test identified several effective antibiotics rejected by standard tests. Furthermore, when the new and standard tests were matched, there was an almost perfect prediction of treatment success or failure.

The study required a tour de force exploration of more than 500 combinations of antibiotics and bacteria. The findings suggest that the standard test is incorrect ~15% of the time. And since doctors rely on this test to make treatment decisions, it can lead to the wrong antibiotic being prescribed.

The project was led by Professor Michael Mahan and his UC Santa Barbara research team of Douglas Heithoff, Lucien Barnes, and Scott Mahan, along with Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital physicians Lynn Fitzgibbons, MD and Jeffrey Fried, MD, and Professor John House of the University of Sydney. , Australia

“People are not petri dishes, which is why antibiotics fail,” Mahan said. “Testing under conditions that mimic those in the body improves the accuracy with which laboratory tests predict drug potency.”

Clinicians are aware of the flaws in the gold standard test. When recommended antibiotics don’t work, they must rely on their experience to decide the appropriate antibiotics for their patients.

This study provides a potential solution to address the disparity between antibiotics indicated by standard tests and actual patient outcomes.

“Re-evaluation of FDA-approved antibiotics may be much more beneficial than the time and cost of developing new drugs to combat antimicrobial resistance,” explained Fitzgibbons, an infectious disease physician, “which could result in significant savings in lives and costs”.

“Sepsis treatments are expensive and require long hospital stays,” Heithoff explained, “and testing and retesting is not only time-consuming and labor-intensive, but also leads to antibiotic resistance.”

The new test will reduce costs for the healthcare industry in its efforts to identify new drugs to combat antimicrobial-resistant infections.

“More accurate tests reduce drug discovery costs by expediting the detection of lead candidates well in advance of costly human clinical trials,” said House, a clinical veterinarian.

Fried, an intensive care physician, added: “Human safety and efficacy clinical studies will need to be conducted to ensure that these findings are applicable to patients with various infections and sepsis.”

This research was supported by grants from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health and the US Army Office of Research through the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies (ICB) Cooperative Agreement and Contract ).

“As a gaucho, I am always proud to promote legislation that provides critical support for the great work being done by the UCSB ICB and other researchers,” said representative Salud Carbajal. “With the support provided by laws created by my colleagues and I on the Armed Services Committee, UCSB ICB was able to develop a new test method that revealed that FDA-approved antibiotics can effectively treat multi-resistant superbugs. This would be game change for many in our community with limited access to health care, and I’m proud to see the support included in the legislation I helped sign play a role in moving this forward.”