Scientists from the University of Warwick and Monash University have discovered a powerful new antibiotic that could help fight dangerous bacterial infections that no longer respond to regular treatments.
These superbug infections, like MRSA and VRE, are becoming harder to treat because the bacteria have evolved resistance to most current antibiotics.
The discovery is giving hope that we can stay ahead in the fight against antimicrobial resistance, or AMR.
AMR is one of the biggest threats to global health. The World Health Organization has warned that the world is running out of effective antibiotics and that new ones are not being developed fast enough.
Since creating new antibiotics is expensive and brings in little profit, many drug companies are not investing in them. That’s why this new discovery is so important—it may offer a simple and effective solution in a time of growing need.
The antibiotic was found by looking more closely at a chemical process that scientists already knew about. Methylenomycin A is a known antibiotic that was discovered about 50 years ago.
Scientists had studied it for decades, and even recreated it in labs, but no one had tested the in-between steps, called intermediates, in the chemical process that makes methylenomycin A. That changed with this new study.
Researchers discovered a compound called pre-methylenomycin C lactone, which is one of these hidden intermediates. When they tested it, they found it was over 100 times more effective than methylenomycin A against certain bacteria.
It worked especially well against two dangerous bugs—Staphylococcus aureus and Enterococcus faecium. These are the bacteria that cause MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staph) and VRE (vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus), infections that are very difficult to treat with current antibiotics.
What makes this discovery even more exciting is that the bacteria didn’t show signs of resistance to this new compound. In experiments, even when conditions favored resistance to vancomycin—a last-resort antibiotic—pre-methylenomycin C lactone still worked.
That means this compound could become a powerful weapon against infections that are resistant to everything else.
The surprising part is that the bacterium producing this strong antibiotic, called Streptomyces coelicolor, is not new. In fact, scientists have studied it since the 1950s.
It seems that this bacterium may have originally evolved to make the stronger antibiotic, pre-methylenomycin C lactone, but over time began producing the weaker version, methylenomycin A, for reasons we don’t yet fully understand.
To make this antibiotic useful for treatment, scientists also developed a way to produce it in larger amounts. A team at Monash University figured out how to make the compound in a lab in a way that’s efficient and scalable. This means they can now begin testing it further in pre-clinical studies and possibly develop it into a drug that can be used in hospitals.
According to the researchers, this discovery suggests a new strategy for finding future antibiotics: test the intermediate steps in natural chemical processes.
Many of these compounds may have been overlooked simply because they were seen as steps along the way rather than final products. But as this study shows, those hidden steps may be the most powerful antibiotics of all.
With over 1 million lives lost each year due to drug-resistant infections, a breakthrough like this could make a huge difference. A simple compound hiding in plain sight might be the key to saving lives and turning the tide against superbugs.
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The study is published in Journal of the American Chemical Society.
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