Next Generation Antibiotics

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: less than a century ago. Why have bacteria adapted so quickly?

There are a number of factors. The first is that, people who are prescribed antibiotics take just part of their medicine, feel better, and then discontinue to pop the pills. The most resistant bacteria return in full force. Then, even taking antibiotics properly can cause the benign bacteria in a person’s stomach to become resistant. If these harmless but antibiotic resistant bacteria interact with disease causing bacteria, the antibiotic resistance can easily spread to the dangerous bacteria. The threat of antibiotic resistance cannot be easily dismissed as insignificant and rudimentary. World Health Organisation (WHO) predicts that diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and pneumonia could have no effective therapies within the next 10 years. According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, USA, 90,000 Americans succumb to hospital-acquired bacterial infections every year due to resistance to antibiotics. There are growing instances of patients dying in various European countries too, due to drug resistance. Unfortunately in India, the record-keeping methods that hospitals use, tends to mask this growing menace. Though there is no doubt that the damage done by antibiotic-resistant bacteria is much higher here.

“The threat of antibiotic resistance is more severe in India,” informs Anand Bidarkar, vice-president (business development), SIRO Clinpharm. “With HIV and tuberculosis cases on the rise, it will be a double whammy for India,” he adds.

Says Venkat Jasti, chairman, Suven Life Sciences, “Though there is a need to develop next generation antibiotics with the existing ones getting resistance, Indian companies are yet to focus on them.”

Currently, Indian companies are meeting some of the unmet medical needs of the masses in the areas of diabetes, oncology and cardiovascular diseases.

According to Dr Reddy’s Laboratories (DRL), respiratory infections are on the rise as the rate of in-patient care is picking up. With the threat of antibiotic resistance assuming alarming proportions, drug companies are increasingly researching for antibiotics in unconventional places.

Italian scientists have successfully isolated antimicrobial agents from frog skin and tested them on strains of multidrug-resistant bacteria that are a growing cause of infections in hospitals. Not only did these agents kill the bacteria directly, they also gave a boost to the host immune system to help clear infections more quickly, informs a Pfizer official.