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New Drug Modified to Fight Antibiotic Resistance

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Ivana De Domenico: New Drug Modified to Fight Antibiotic Resistance

The drug vancomycin has always been a difficult one for bacteria to resist. It’s been used to treat bacterial infections for the past sixty years, and only recently have some bacteria begun to develop a resistance to it.

Still, any bacterial resistance is a bad sign, especially as many doctors and pharmacists are beginning to worry that so-called “superbugs” will one day render life-saving antibiotics useless. Overprescription of antibiotics, including preventative antibiotics and those used on livestock, has caused many once easily-curable diseases to evolve an immunity to antibiotic cures.

But now, some scientists from the Scripps Research Institute in California believe they’ve come up with an antibiotic too powerful for even the most antibiotic-resistant superbugs to survive. In a publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers announced that they had modified vancomycin to make it it 25,000 times more effective against vancomycin-resistant bacteria than non-modified vancomycin.

These modifications included overcoming vancomycin’s molecular basis, which prevents bacteria from evolving immunity and creating two independent modes of action, meaning that the drug targets the disease in multiple ways. Put together, these modifications mean that vancomycin should be effective in fighting antibiotic-resistant strains, and avoid creating new strains that are resistant to the modified antibiotic.

Among other diseases, vancomycin is used to treat MRSA, an infection notorious for its antibiotic resistance. It has also been found effective against colitis, sepsis, and diarrhea.

Although some publications have suggested that the modified vancomycin is a miracle drug marking the end of superbugs forever, in reality it will only affect certain infections. Microbiologists have pointed out that vancomycin only impacts gram-positive bacteria, a designation that includes staphylococci, pneumococci, and the bacteria responsible for diphtheria and anthrax. A lot of these infections aren’t frequently caused by resistant strains…yet. Meanwhile, gram-negative bacteria, including those that cause infections such as E. coli and Klebsiella, cannot be fought with vancomycin, beefed-up or otherwise.

Still, this could be a great stride forward in the fight against antibiotic resistance. The next step will be to test the drug outside of the lab, in animal and human trials. So despite the encouraging results that we’ve seen in lab testing, it will be at least another five more years before we could see this drug on the market. In the meantime, scientists will also need to work on developing new powerful antibiotics, in order to stay ahead of these rapidly-evolving bacteria.

Paving the Way for Personalized Medicine

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Ivana de Domenico- paving the way for personalized medicine

When you’re sick or suffering from a medical condition, you go to the doctor and, after a brief evaluation, they’ll most likely diagnose you with something and prescribe you a medication for it- the same medication millions of others have taken. But what if you could take a pill that was tailored for your unique genetic makeup? It sounds like something out of a science fiction movie, doesn’t it? Believe it or not, the day of personalized medicine is not too far away.

According to Genome magazine, medicine as we currently know it “revolves around ‘standards of care,’ the best courses of prevention or treatment for the general population, or the average person on the street.” When you’re sick, you’re treated based on your condition (which many others could share), not your personal case. Doctors take a one-size-fits-all approach.

Now, scientists are looking toward a more personal approach. In the most basic terms, personalized medicine is medicine based on genomic makeup. Even though you may not have heard of the term “personalized medicine” until more recently, it has actually been around for more than 20 years, since scientists first set out to sequence the first human genome. In 2003, the Human Genome Project was successfully completed when scientists mapped the entire human gene sequence. Even if we haven’t seen the results yet, the completion of the Human Genome Project was a milestone in scientific research. Since then, researchers have discovered over 1,800 disease genes and utilized more than 2,000 genetic tests and 350 biotechnology-based products for clinical trials. But none of this progress is an instance of personalized medicine…yet.

Today, patients can have their personal genomes sequenced. Just this ability to chart a person’s individualized genetic makeup is evidence of the potential of targeted treatments to fight diseases and conditions.

The push toward personalized medicine really took off with cancer research, and that is where it has made the most headway. Personalized medicine has already had some success at treating certain forms of cancer, with the Wall Street Journal reporting in 2011 that melanoma, thyroid, colorectal, lung, pancreatic, and breast cancers have had substantial percentages of tumors in patients that could be targeted by personalized drugs. What makes targeted treatments so profound in cancer treatment, as opposed to chemotherapy, is that this form of treatment targets cancer cells rather than destroying all fast-growing cells it comes into contact with.

Several startup companies specializing in artificial intelligence and big data analysis are already paving the way for introducing personalized medicine to the mainstream. For instance, Deep Genomics, founded by researchers at the University of Toronto, is employing artificial intelligence to predict how genetic mutations will change cells and affect the human body. Epinomics, founded by researchers at Stanford University, is sequencing a map of what turns genes on and off so that physicians could use this information to develop personalized treatments. Vitagene, a San Francisco startup, is using DNA to deliver personalized nutrition plans listing what vitamins you should take and in what doses.

As promising as all of these personalized medicine anecdotes are, we are not quite there yet. “While personalized medicine is escalating and becoming more common, it’s still in its infancy, and there are not yet enough products on the market that have penetrated the consciousness of the average patient,” says Edward Abrahams, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Personalized Medicine Coalition. One of the areas where personalized medicine could have huge potential is in treating mental health disorders; several pharmaceutical companies are selling tests to psychologists so that they can select personalized drug treatments for their patients based on DNA mutations and their metabolizing rate. However, scientists concede that they know a lot more about cancer than they do about the brain. “In psychiatry, it’s much harder because we don’t know enough about how the brain works,” said University of Kentucky psychiatry professor, Jose de Leon.

Even though personalized medicine has already made a lot of headway and the technology to take it even further exists, several kinks will need to be worked out before it becomes the norm: flexible payment systems will need to be developed, regulatory guidelines will have to be implemented, medical schools will need to integrate personalized medicine into their curricula, and patients must be on board. Then, when all those things are achieved, personalized medicine will just be medicine.

UT Southwestern Announces New Regenerative Research Center

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        The UT Southwestern Medical Center is one of the premier academic medical centers in the nation, notorious for pioneering biomedical research.  According to an article completed by News Wise, the medical center is continuing to hold true to this tradition, as it announces the creation of a separate center dedicated entirely to researching regenerative medicine.

UT Southwestern Medical Center is the topic of Ivana De Domenico's latest blog post
UT Southwestern Medical Center, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

        The new center is made possible due to a charitable contribution from the Hamon Charitable Foundation that totaled ten million dollars.  The goal of the newly formed Hamon Center for Regenerative Science and Medicine will be to understand the basic processes and contributors to the development of tissue and organs.  From there, the center hopes this information can be applied to creating new approaches towards healing and regeneration, specifically in terms of stem cell biology, tissue engineering and organ fabrication.  In essence, researchers hope to use the knowledge they gain to help regenerate, repair and replace damaged tissue brought on by age or accident.

        Leading the center will be the renowned Doctor Eric Olson, who is known for his contributions and insights into the degeneration, regeneration and development of the heart.  For his work, Olson has received numerous awards, titles and honors, including several elections to key scientific panels.  He has served on the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  In the last two years, he has received three prestigious awards.

Olson has served as a member of the UT Southwestern team since 1995, when he was recruited as the founding chair of the Department of Molecular Biology.  With this experience, Olson will work to establish the center based on a combination of collaborations.  Existing faculty will be recruited to assist on upcoming projects, in addition to new junior and senior colleagues who will be brought in to specifically work for the Harmon Center.