Researchers from Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have designed an antimicrobial polymer that can kill bacteria resistant to commonly used antibiotics, including the superbug methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). The breakthrough can pave the way for the development of medicine to which bacteria have a significantly slower rate of developing resistance, and help prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths each year caused by drug-resistant bacteria.
The new polymer is explained in a paper published last month in Nature Communications. It was jointly published by a group of scientists at NTU and SMART's Antimicrobial Resistance Interdisciplinary Research Group (AMR IRG) and led by Mary Chan-Park, SMART AMR principal investigator and professor at NTU’s School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering; and Kevin Pethe, associate professor at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine at NTU.
Increasing resistance to antimicrobial medicine is a cause for serious concern, with at least 700,000 deaths each year caused by drug-resistant infections and diseases, according to a recent World Health Organisation report. In the United States alone, an antibiotic-resistant infection is acquired every 11 seconds, while a related death occurs every 15 minutes. While alpha-peptides have long been used to treat resistant bacteria such as MRSA, they tend to be rather unstable or toxic in the body. So, for the first time, NTU and SMART researchers tested the use of beta-peptides to fight such bacteria in living beings. Designed for stability, the innovative new polymer degrades slowly in the body, giving it more time to work. Importantly, it has little to no toxicity impact.
Read more at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Image: The co-beta peptide treatment is shown to eradicate biofilm bacteria such as MRSA, a particularly difficult form of bacteria to treat.