Frontiers | Science News
Researchers from Finland and Norway developed a new suite of methods for the screening of antivirulence activity of unknown compounds of bacterial origin. The compounds tested had been derived from actinobacteria living inside invertebrates in the Arctic Sea. They found two interesting compounds with strong antivirulence or antibacterial effects against enteropathogenic E. coli. These results demonstrate the potential of prospecting novel habitats for promising new antibacterial drugs, to solve the current global antibiotics crisis.
Antibiotics are the linchpin of modern medicine: without them, anyone with open wounds or needing to undergo surgery would be at constant risk of dangerous infections. Yet we continue to face a global antibiotics crisis, as more and more resistant strains of bacteria are evolving, while the rate of discovery of fundamentally new antibiotics has been much slower.
But there is reason for hope: 70% of all currently licensed antibiotics have been derived from actinobacteria in the soil, and most environments on Earth have not yet been prospected for them. Thus, focusing the search on actinobacteria in other habitats is a promising strategy – especially if this were to yield novel molecules that neither kill bacteria outright nor stop them from growing, but only reduce their ‘virulence’ or capacity for causing disease. This is because it is hard for targeted pathogenic strains to evolve resistance under these conditions, while such antivirulence compounds are also less likely to cause unwanted side-effects.
