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Researchers at the University of Otago have discovered a new property of a new anti-tuberculosis drug that could help develop more drugs to treat the leading killer of infectious diseases in the world.
Worldwide, about 1.7 million deaths Professor Greg Cook of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology of the University of Otago, as well as Dr. Kiel Hards , a postdoctoral fellow, have investigated one of the first new anti-TB drugs. Bedaquiline is the first new drug to be developed after 40 years of research for more effective drugs against tuberculosis and only the FDA (Food and Drug Administration). and Drug Administration) approved in 2012, "says Professor Cook.
"But a single drug will not be enough to reverse a 40-year lull in drug development, so our lab is actively looking for new drugs. rugs to supplement Bedaquiline and extend treatment options available to clinicians worldwide. "
In order to develop better drugs to combat TB, Dr. Hards says it's important to understand why Bedaquiline is so good." 19659002] "The most promising aspects of the drug are its ability to shorten the treatment time to eight weeks and that its target is unconventional for an antimicrobial. Bedaquiline disrupts the ability of M. tuberculosis to produce energy, "says Dr. Hards.
" What we have discovered is that the drug has a second activity or property that can explain how it is able to to kill non-replicative cells. This second activity (called ionophoric) involves the movement or closure of ions across the mycobacterial membrane resulting from the dissipation of the critical ion gradients required for growth and survival. "
Potentially, their discovery was recently published in the international journal Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences could have ramifications for other antibiotics because it could To be the case that a lot of other antibiotics work through this mechanism, Professor Cook says. "We believe we can design more efficient" The biological electricity that these ions normally create is essential to the production of these antibiotics. energy and a whole series of other extremely important cellular processes. It was already known that disrupting these gradients of ions is fatal for M. tuberculosis but before Bedaquiline there was no medication that could do this and be safe in humans. "
Professor Cook says that it is very rare to discover new properties researchers often focus on the primary target of a drug and often the side or side effects of drugs are ignored. [19659002] "Subsequent discoveries are usually accidental, but in the case of bedaquiline, we realized that previous data did not explain how" Many researchers are now focusing on how antimicrobials actually kill bacteria for discover new cell death pathways. "Otago researchers were the main researchers in the study, but worked in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Technology. in the Netherlands, from the University of Illinois in the United States and from the University of Vrije in Amsterdam
The work received financial support from the Fund s Marsden, Royal Society and the Maurice Wilkins Center for Molecular Biodiscovery.
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