Tuberculosis, an infectious disease that killed 1.5 million people in 2020, is most commonly treated with a cocktail of four drugs that must be taken for up to six months. This treatment plan, however, can have the unintended consequence of leading to antibiotic resistance, both because people may not finish the full course of treatment and, more directly, because one of the drugs can act on bacteria other than Mycobacterium tuberculosis, including components of the intestinal microflora that are critical to health and well-being.
October 6, 2022
Tuberculosis, an infectious disease that killed 1.5 million people in 2020, is most commonly treated with a cocktail of four drugs that must be taken for up to six months. This treatment plan, however, can have the unintended consequence of leading to antibiotic resistance, both because people may not finish the full course of treatment and, more directly, because one of the drugs can act on bacteria other than Mycobacterium tuberculosis, including components of the intestinal microflora that are critical to health and well-being.
Recently, researchers identified an antimicrobial compound, which they named evybactin, which could selectively act against Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
Their findings were published in Nature Chemical Biology.
«Microorganisms such as actinomycetes and filamentous fungi have long been used as a source of antibiotics,» said first author Yu Imai, assistant professor at the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Shinshu University, who previously discovered a new antibiotic while studying under Distinguished Professor Kim Lewis at the Antimicrobial Discovery Center, Northeastern University.
