LOS ANGELES TIMES – Inside every human is a thriving zoo of bacteria, fungi, viruses and other microscopic organisms collectively known as the microbiome.
Trillions of microbes live in the digestive tract alone, a menagerie estimated to contain more than 1,000 species.
This ecosystem of tiny stuff affects our health in ways science is only beginning to understand, facilitating digestion, metabolism, the immune response and more.
But when serious infection sets in, the most powerful antibiotics take a merciless approach, wiping out colonies of beneficial bacteria in the digestive tract and often prompting secondary health problems.
“Increasingly, researchers are recognizing the benefits of protecting the human gut microbiome, particularly because its integrity and diversity is linked to metabolic influences on mental health and physical health conditions,” said Dr. Oladele A. Ogunseitan, a professor of population health and disease prevention at UC Irvine.
Drug-resistant bugs are evolving faster than new medicines are being developed, rendering the current arsenal of medicines increasingly ineffective. But the more we understand about the microbiome, the clearer it is that we need antibiotics that are discerning in their targets.
With that goal in mind, a chemistry team at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is experimenting with a compound that attempts to address both problems.
The antibiotic, lolamicin, both successfully vanquished several drug-resistant pathogens in mice while sparing the animals’ microbiome. The results were published in the journal Nature.
“Only recently has it been recognized that killing these [beneficial] bacteria is having many deleterious effects on patients,” said Paul J. Hergenrother, a chemistry professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who co-led the study. “We have been interested for some time in finding antibiotics that would be effective without killing the good bacteria.”
The team set out to create an antibiotic that would both preserve the gut microbiome while targeting gram-negative bacteria, a particularly hardy category of superbugs …
