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"Super Bacteria" that resist the most powerful antibiotic treatments: this is the new threat to human health. While in 2014, a report on antibiotic resistance predicted that by 2050, antimicrobial-resistant infections could become the leading cause of death in the world, causing 10 million deaths a year, a new study published in review The Lancet Infectious Diseases makes an equally alarming finding.
According to the researchers, antibiotic-resistant bacteria caused the deaths of 33,000 people in 2015 in the European Union. "The burden of these infections is comparable to that of the flu, TB and HIV / AIDS combined," worried scientists.
One-third of deaths in Italy
To reach this figure, they have developed a model for calculating contaminations and deaths for five types of infections using data from the European Antimicrobia Resistance Surveillance Network (EARS). They concluded that 671,689 people were infected in 2015 and 33,110 people died as a result of infection with multidrug-resistant bacteria.
Among the victims, a majority of children under 12, as well as people aged 65 and over. Italy and Greece are particularly affected by these infections with multi-resistant bacteria. Italy, in particular, accounts for more than a third of the deaths badociated with bacteria resistant to antibiotics. In 2015, 10,000 people died of infections, including the bacterium Escherichia coli (E. coli) and staphylococcus aureus.
For doctors, the overconsumption of antibiotics is the cause of these deaths. Of the 670,000 multidrug-resistant infections estimated in 2015, almost 75% were contracted in hospitals. Hence the "urgency of taking into account antibiotic resistance as a vital health data for patients and the need to design alternative treatments for patients who have other diseases and are vulnerable because of of diminished immune defenses or age ".
Bioconjugation against super bacteria
This estimate of the number of deaths from infection with a multidrug-resistant bacterium comes as a team of researchers has just developed a way to modify antibiotics to make them effective against infections caused by multi-resistant bacteria.
Their work, published in the journal Nature Chemistry, focus on the antibiotic Vancomycin, which they have been able to make more potent against two strains of bacteria that have become resistant to drugs. They used an earlier discovery that the amino acid selenocysteine can bind as a "handle" on small molecule drugs such as vancomicyne. Called antimicrobial peptides, these small proteins are part of the immune defense of most organisms.
When they used this method to fix the peptides with vancomycin, the scientists found that they were constantly attached to the same place on the antibiotic, producing chemically identical molecules. They then tested several combinations involving different antimicrobial peptides, until finding the one capable of overcoming multi-resistant bacteria. In combination with dermaseptin peptide, vancomycin is five times more resistant against infectious bacteria Enterococcus faecalis (E. faecalis), widespread in health facilities.
The super bacteria Acinetobacter baumannii
In addition, the team discovered that vancomycin combined with another antimicrobial peptide called RP-1 eliminated the super-bacterium Acinetobacter baumannii, against which vancomycin alone has no effect. A. baumannii is also very resistant to drugs and a common cause of healthcare-badociated infections.
Tests with about thirty other molecules, including resveratrol and serotonin, suggest that the approach can easily bind peptides to virtually any organic molecule that has the "right kind of electron-rich cycle," note the researchers. "In view of these results, we believe that our chemistry will be a valuable bioconjugation technique for the community and could lead to a generation of therapeutic conjugate molecules" capable of eliminating multidrug-resistant bacteria.
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