Next Generation Antibiotics

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

The antibiotics that you gulp down to ward off serious infections could well trace their origins to frog skin, alligators’ blood, wastewater treatment plants or algae and micro-organisms found in the seabed.

A government-sponsored initiative that involves nine research institutes, is seeking to tackle diseases like cancer, diabetes, inflammation and infectious diseases by developing antibiotics derived from bacteria found in ecological niches— ponds, seabed, water reservoirs and forest reserves. Researchers from the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) at Nagpur are studying bacteria found in wastewater treatment plants. With antibiotic properties, these bacteria hold the promise to help develop medicines for the treatment of infectious diseases, a department of science and technology official informs.

For much of the 20th century, doctors waged war against infectious diseases, including malaria, tuberculosis, and pneumonia with the best weapon they had—antibiotics. Over the years, use of these drugs not only kept serious infectious diseases under control, saved lives and eased the suffering of millions of people, they also contributed to the major gains in life expectancy witnessed globally.

Unfortunately, these gains are now seriously jeopardised by an alarming development—antibiotic resistance. That is, the emergence and spread of microbes—the collective term for bacteria, fungi, parasites, and viruses—that are resistant to antibiotics like penicillin, streptomycin, gentamicin, ampicillin, amoxicillin and more than 150 others, that have been developed to combat the spread and severity of many of these diseases.

For a layman, it means that a lot of people get sick because they have resistant bacteria and the antibiotics that they are given either don’t work or don’t work well enough to get rid of the infection.

Interestingly, the bacterial infections which contribute most to human disease are also those in which emerging and antibiotic resistance is most evident: diarrhoeal diseases, respiratory tract infections, meningitis, sexually transmitted infections, and hospital-acquired infections. The development of resistance to drugs commonly used to treat malaria is of particular concern, as is the emerging resistance to anti-HIV drugs.

There is no doubt that action in the $25-billion global antibiotics market is set to hot up and efforts to develop next generation antibiotics will intensify in the times to come. In the recent past, several pharmaceutical companies had drifted from developing antibiotics primarily due to the low revenues and the stringent FDA regulations. However, the trend is now changing with the compelling need to address antibiotic resistance.