New antibiotic kills pathogenic bacteria, spares healthy gut microbes

Researchers have developed a new antibiotic that reduced or eliminated drug-resistant bacterial infections in mouse models of acute pneumonia and sepsis while sparing healthy microbes in the mouse gut.

The drug, called lolamicin, also warded off secondary infections with Clostridioides difficile, a common and dangerous hospital-associated bacterial infection, and was effective against more than 130 multidrug-resistant bacterial strains in cell culture.

"People are starting to realize that the antibiotics we've all been taking – that are fighting infection and, in some instances, saving our lives – also are having these deleterious effects on us," said University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign chemistry professor Paul Hergenrother, who led the study with former doctoral student Kristen Munoz.

"The mouse microbiome is a good tool for modeling human infections because human and mouse gut microbiomes are very similar," Munoz said. "Studies have shown that antibiotics that cause gut dysbiosis in mice have a similar effect in humans."

Treatment with standard antibiotics amoxicillin and clindamycin caused dramatic shifts in the overall structure of bacterial populations in the mouse gut, diminishing the abundance several beneficial microbial groups, the team found.

"In contrast, lolamicin did not cause any drastic changes in taxonomic composition over the course of the three-day treatment or the following 28-day recovery," the researchers wrote.

Zdroj obrázku: CDC/Lois S. Wiggs, Wikimedia Commons.