When it comes to the threat of antibiotic resistance, the World Health Organization doesn't mince words: some diseases, it says, "will have no effective therapies within the next ten years." Indeed, more than 70 percent of the bacteria that cause hospital-acquired infections are resistant to at least one of the antibiotics commonly used to treat them, and it's only going to get worse. But a chemical found on amphibian skin—produced in response to stress, injury, or contact with microorganisms—has just been found to kill some drug-resistant bacteria.
Italian scientists isolated immune chemicals (called "amphibian peptide analogues," or APAs) from the skin of three different species of frogs and tested them against multidrug-resistant strains of bacteria associated with hospital acquired infections, including Staphylococcus aureus (the bug that causes MRSA). While some of the chemicals they found were inhibited by chemicals found in human blood (which would render them useless against common bloodstream infections), one chemical, called esculentin 1b, killed the drug-resistant microbes within 20 minutes even in the presence of blood. And it has an added bonus: the chemical destroys the bacterial membrane, a part of the microbe that is difficult to modify over time. This means that bacteria would have a harder time developing resistance to this chemical than they would to conventional antibiotics, by several orders of magnitude.
The authors, who published their study in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, point out that they're not the first to find APAs that could serve as antibiotics: similar chemicals are being tested in clinical trials as anti-infective agents. But a lot of these can't be used to treat blood infections. This study is one of the first to identify an APA that could be used in such situations. Ribbit.
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