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Date: 29th March 2006
Contacts :
Professor Tony Maxwell: +44 (0)1603 450771
JIC Press Office and Out of hours: +44 (0)1603 450000
Dr Victoria Just: +44 (0)7887 707393
Resistance is futile: Making Drugs from Bugs
Antibiotic resistance is a major problem worldwide and there is an urgent
need for new antibiotics to be developed. Potential new drugs are usually
made in the lab which is complicated and time-consuming. An international
team of scientists are using bacteria found naturally in the soil to produce new
antibiotics in the fight against drug-resistant “Super-bugs” such as MRSA.
Led by Professor Tony Maxwell of the John Innes Centre (Norwich, UK) [1]
and Professor Lutz Heide of the Pharmazeutisches Institut, Tübingen
(Germany) [2], the team has developed ways of engineering harmless soil
bacteria called Streptomyces to do the difficult chemistry for them.
Streptomyces naturally make antibiotics to kill other bacteria in the soil.
Unfortunately these don’t make very good drugs for use in humans because
they are not very soluble in water and so cannot get into the bloodstream
easily. The researchers have found a way to modify the bacteria to
manufacture new varieties of these antibiotics that could be developed into
more effective drugs. By studying variations of two natural antibiotics
produced by Streptomyces, called novobiocin and clorobiocin, the scientists
are determining which parts of the molecules are essential for their
antibacterial activity. They hope that by varying other parts of the molecules
they can design new antibiotics with better activity and fewer side effects.
Novobiocin and clorobiocin work by interfering with how DNA, the molecule
that stores genetic information, is packed into the bacterial cell. The DNA in
human cells is packed differently and so these cells are not affected by the
antibiotics.
“This work is an excellent example of the European Union [3] at its best,
combining the forces of seven labs from five different member states to carry
out work that would not be possible by in lab working alone” said Tony
Maxwell “We are very optimistic that we can make key discoveries about
these antibiotics that will help them become vital weapons in our fight against
MRSA and other bacterial infections”.
This exciting work is published this week in the journal Antimicrobial Agents
and Chemotherapy [4] and will also be discussed at an event in Norwich as
part of the BA Festival of Science in September 2006 [5] .
Notes for Editors
1. The John Innes Centre (JIC), Norwich, UK is an independent, worldleading research centre in plant and microbial sciences. The JIC has
over 800 staff and students. JIC carries out high quality fundamental,
strategic and applied research to understand how plants and microbes
work at the molecular, cellular and genetic levels. The JIC also trains
scientists and students, collaborates with many other research
laboratories and communicates its science to end-users and the
general public. www.jic.ac.uk. he JIC is grant-aided by the
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.
2. Pharmazeutisches Institut, Auf der Morgenstelle 8, D-72076 Tübingen,
Germany. Tel.: +49 7071-29 72460
3. This work is published in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and
Chemotherapy (Volume 50, issue 4) (Publishers: American Society for
Microbiology).
4. This work was funded by a grant from the European Commission
(Combigyrase LSHB-CT-2004-503466).
5. The BA (British Association for the Advancement of Science) Annual
Festival of Science runs from 2nd-9th September 2006 in Norwich, and
is the biggest public science event in the UK. It is expected to attract
over 10,000 people from around the world with the theme of “People,
Science and Society”. Further information at http://www.the-ba.net/theba/Events/FestivalofScience/