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www.sciencedaily.com 2015 00001409.txt

#Newly discovered antibiotic kills pathogens without resistance For years, pathogens'resis tance to antibi otics has put them one step ahead of researchers, which is causing a public health crisis, according to Uni ver sity Dis tin guished Pro fessor Kim Lewis. But in new research, Lewis and his col leagues present a newly dis cov ered antibi otic that elim i nates pathogens without encoun tering any detectable resistance--a finding that chal lenges long-`held sci en tific beliefs and holds great promise for treating chronic infec tions like tuber cu losis and those caused by MRSA. The research which is making head lines around the world and receiving applause from the sci ence com mu nity, was pub lished Wednesday in the journal Nature. North eastern researchers'pio neering work to develop a novel method for growing uncul tured bac teria led to the dis covery of the antibi otic, called teixobactin, and Lewis'lab played a key role in ana lyzing and testing the com pound for resis tance from pathogens. Lewis, who is the paper's lead author, said this marks the first dis covery of an antibi otic to which resis tance by muta tions of pathogens have not been identified. Lewis and North eastern biology pro fessor Slava Epstein co-`authored the paper with col leagues from the Uni ver sity of Bonn in Ger many, Novo Bi otic Phar ma ceu ti cals in Cam bridge, Mass a chu setts, and Selcia Lim ited in the United kingdom. The research team says teixobactin's dis covery presents a promising new oppor tu nity to treat chronic infec tions caused by staphy lo coccus aureus, or MSRA, that are highly resis tant to antibi otics, as well as tuber cu losis, which involves a com bi na tion of ther a pies with neg a tive side effects. The screening of soil microor gan isms has pro duced most antibi otics but only 1 per cent of them will grow in the lab, and this lim ited resource was mined over in the 1960s, Lewis explained. He and Epstein spent years seeking to address this problem by tap ping into a new source of antibi otics beyond those cre ated by syn thetic means: uncul tured bac teria, which make up 99 per cent of all species in external envi ron ments. They devel oped a novel method for growing uncul tured bac teria in their nat ural envi ron ment, which led to the founding of Novo Bi otic. Their approach involves the ichip, a minia ture device Epstein's team cre ated that can iso late and help grow single cells in their nat ural envi ron ment and thereby pro vides researchers with much improved access to uncul tured bac teria. Novo Bi otic has bled since assem about 50, 000 strains of uncul tured bac teria and dis cov ered 25 new antibi otics, of which teixobactin is the latest and most inter esting, Lewis said. The antibi otic was dis cov ered during a rou tine screening for antimi cro bial mate rial using this method. Lewis then tested the com pound for resis tance devel op ment and did not find mutant MSRA or Mycobac terium tuber cu losis resis tant to teixobactin, which was found to block sev eral dif ferent tar gets in the cell wall syn thesis pathway.""Our impres sion is that nature pro duced a com pound that evolved to be free of resis tance, "Lewis said.""This chal lenges the dogma that we've oper ated under that bac teria will always develop resis tance. Well, maybe not in this case.""Gerard Wright, a pro fessor in the Depart ment of Bio chem istry and Bio med ical Sci ences at Mcmaster Uni ver sity and who was involved not in this research, exam ined the team's work in a sep a rate article for Nature pub lished in con cert with the new research paper. In his article, Wright noted that while it remains to be seen whether other mech a nisms for resis tance against teixobactin exist in the envi ron ment, the team's work could lead to iden ti fying"other'resistance-`light'antibiotics.""""The researchers')work offers hope that inno va tion and cre ativity can com bine to solve the antibi otics crisis, "Wright wrote. Going for ward, the research team hopes to develop teixobactin into a drug. In 2013, Lewis revealed ground breaking research in a sep a rate paper pub lished By nature that pre sented a novel approach to treat and elim i nate MRSA--the so-called"superbug"that infects 1 mil lion Amer i cans annu ally. Lewis and his team dis cov ered a way to destroy the dor mant per sister cells which are key to the suc cess of chronic infec tions caused by MRSA. Lewis said this latest research lays new ground to advance his inno v a tive work on treating MRSA and other chronic infections e

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