Scientists discover new broad-spectrum antibiotic based on arsenic

Antibiotic resistance has been described as one of the greatest threats of our time to public health. There is an urgent need for new antibiotics to fight the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria around the world.

Researchers at Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine at Florida International University are part of an international team that has discovered a new broad-spectrum antibiotic containing arsenic. The study, published in Natureof Biology of communication, is a collaboration between Barry P. Rosen, Yoshinaga Masafumi, Venkadesh Sarkarai Nadar and others from the Department of Cell Biology and Pharmacology, and Satoru Ishikawa and Masato Kuramata from the Institute of Agri-Environmental Sciences, NARO Japan.

"The antibiotic, arsinothricin or AST, is a natural product made by soil bacteria and is effective against many types of bacteria, which means" broad spectrum ", said Rosen, co-author principal of the study published in the Nature newspaper, Biology of communication. "Arsinothricin is the first and only known natural antibiotic containing arsenic, and we have high hopes in this regard."

Although it contains arsenic, researchers claim to have tested the toxicity of AST on human blood cells and indicated that it "does not kill human cells in tissue culture." ".

"People are scared when they hear the word" arsenic "because it can be a toxin and a carcinogen, but the use of arsenicals as antimicrobials and anticancer agents is well established," Rosen says. In 1908, Paul Erlich won the Nobel Prize in Medicine after discovering a cure for arsenic-based syphilis. Arsenicals are still used to treat tropical diseases, prevent infectious diseases in poultry and as a chemotherapeutic treatment for leukemia.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately two million people in the United States are infected each year with a drug-resistant bacterium, claiming more than 23,000 lives. The World Health Organization (WHO) warned that "an increasing number of infections, such as pneumonia, tuberculosis, gonorrhea and salmonellosis – are increasingly difficult to treat because the antibiotics used to treat them become less effective. " WHO has recently published a list of global priorities for antibiotic-resistant pathogens that pose the greatest threat to human health.

"We are short of tools to fight these diseases.We need a powerful new antibiotic to solve this problem," said Yoshinaga, the other coauthor of the author. "We have shown that this new arsenic compound can be a potent antibiotic,"

The group of scientists tested the new antibiotic and found that it was "very effective" against some of the most notorious bacteria affecting public health, including E. coli, which can cause serious intestinal infections. and carbapenem-resistant Enterobacter cloacae, an "antibiotic of last resort", responsible for the multiplication of infections in neonatal and intensive care units, and one of the priority pathogens designated by WHO. It also worked against Mycobacterium bovis, responsible for tuberculosis in cattle. This suggests a potential for treating human tuberculosis. Additional tests will be needed to determine the efficacy and toxicity of the antibiotic in animals and humans.

The team is patenting its discovery and hopes to work with the pharmaceutical industry to turn the compound into a drug – a long and costly process that could easily take 10 years. Success is not guaranteed, but the work of these scientists remains extremely important.

"More than 90% of potential drugs fail in clinical trials," says Rosen. "But if you do not bring new drugs into the pipeline, you will not find those that work."