Antibiotic that could win war on superbugs

A NEW antibiotic has been found in the ‘arms race’ against untreatable superbugs.

Closthioamide is one of only a handful of new antibiotics discovered in the past 30 years and could replace older antibiotics that are increasingly failing due to their overuse.

Deadly superbugs have evolved to resist existing treatments in a situation so severe that Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies has warned we are on the brink of a ‘post-antibiotic era’ in which people could soon die from infections caused by relatively minor injuries.

Closthioamide, which was discovered seven years ago, could soon be used to tackle antibiotic-resistant diseases. British researchers found that the drug had a 98 per cent cure rate on samples of gonorrhoea, which is among the ranks of infections that could become, in the words of Dame Sally, an ‘untreatable disease’.

Their study suggests it is an effective antibiotic which – if doctors do not over-prescribe – could continue to work well into the future.

Co-author Dr John Heap, from Imperial College London’s Department of Life Sciences, said: ‘The imminent threat of untreatable antibiotic-resistant infectious diseases is a global problem, for which we urgently need new antibiotics. This new finding might help us take the lead in the arms race against antimicrobial resistance.

‘We are still finding new classes of antibiotics but there are far fewer emerging in recent years than in the golden age of the 1950s, when many of the drugs handed out by GPs were discovered. New antibiotics are urgently needed and the finding that closthioamide is effective is very exciting.’ Closthioamide is thought to work by blocking the action of certain enzymes that maintain DNA inside bacterial cells.

The drug has already been found to fight hospital superbug MRSA and deadly E.coli, raising hopes it could work for many more bacterial infections. With existing ‘lastresort’ antibiotics increasingly being found useless, new alternatives are desperately needed.

However the researchers, whose study was published in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, caution that closthioamide is at least five years away from being available for prescription.

Lead author Dr Victoria Miari, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said further research was needed but added the drug’s potential to tackle bacteria ‘cannot be underestimated’.

‘This finding is very exciting’