Exploring uncharted waters: a new wave of antibiotics discovery?
by Soh Min Min
Common infections such as those of the urinary tract, skin, lung and gut have been treatable for decades. But they are increasingly at risk of being untreatable.
We are now back to fighting the same war we had fought before we discovered antibiotics in the 1940s— infectious disease. “Superbugs”, which are bacteria that do not respond to many types of antibiotics including the last-resort ones like carbapenems, are becoming a rising threat to human health across the world.
Drug-resistant bacteria are currently implicated in 700,000 deaths each year. In the U.S., at least 2 million people get infected with bacteria that are antibiotic-resistant, and at least 23,000 people die each year because of these infections. By 2025, it is estimated that more people will die from these drug-resistant strains than cancer.
Considering that no new antibiotics classes have been discovered since 1987, and “superbugs” are emerging at a rapid pace, it is now a mad rush to uncover new treatment options.
In the recent decade, deep sea exploration has become more feasible due to the development of better equipment to probe the oceans. Antibiotics that we know exist today are mostly from land organisms. But we know next to nothing about what lies below the water, in particular the deepest parts of the ocean.
Recently, fungi have been found in the deep sea mud which led to hopes that new antibiotics could be discovered from organisms living in the deep sea.
We can now look into the DNA of organisms more quickly than ever before to look for new drug leads. This can even be done for organisms that cannot be cultured in the lab, or were previously unaccessible, such as deep sea and extreme environments.
Moreover, some compounds are not made because they are only produced under special circumstances, such as stress, or starvation. But it has been difficult to get at them because it’s been tedious guesswork trying to get those compounds produced. But now that technology can assess lots of DNA at once, we are now discovering that there are a great number of compounds encoded in the genome that could potentially be produced. This is another bubbling area of research — unlocking the expression of such compounds in hopes of getting a new activity out of it and maybe they can be used as drugs.
Now that technology allows us to explore uncharted waters, both literally and figuratively in terms of DNA, we can better tap into the rich resources of nature to help us solve the antibiotic resistance problem of the 21st century. It is hopeful that these areas of research will yield useful molecules that can serve as drugs, or help us look for drugs that we can use to fight the antibiotic resistance war.
