• Question: What do you think of the lack of antibiotic to fight superbug?

    Asked by 895drug29 to Eleni, Hannah, Jenny, Oli, Steven on 8 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Oliver Charity

      Oliver Charity answered on 8 Nov 2016:

      Hi,

      I think it’s awful, but I also thing that there are many promising new therapies in development, such as Phage Therapy (which I work on) and using bacteriophage endolysins (enzymes which chomp up bacterial cells).

      Oli

    • Photo: Jenny Batson

      Jenny Batson answered on 8 Nov 2016:

      Hi
      I think this is a big problem so its good that there is research to develop new therapies. A huge issue is antibiotic resistance and overprescribing of antibiotics which increases the rise of resistance bugs.
      Jenny

    • Photo: Hannah Bolt

      Hannah Bolt answered on 8 Nov 2016:

      Hi,

      I agree with Oli and Jenny – we definitely need to find some more antibiotics for the future! Bacteria, fungi and parasites are all very clever so there are examples of these pathogens becoming resistant to treatments for every single drug that is used currently in medicine. I think this is quite scary, what about you? It might mean that normal operations in hospitals could become very dangerous in the future.

      Luckily, there are lots of scientists trying to solve the problem of antimicrobial reistance – including me!

      In my research I make drugs that have very different structures to ones currently used by doctors. The molecules I make attack the ‘cell membrane’ of bacteria and parasites. A cell membrane is a bit like the skin of these species, so they find it very hard to develop resistance against my drugs. Hopefully in the future my research might help in the fight against super bugs!

      Hannah

    • Photo: Steven Street

      Steven Street answered on 9 Nov 2016:

      Hi 895drug29,

      So that’s a good question!

      Antibiotics have been overused for quite a long time now, which is what leads to resistance as the others have said.

      We’ve had about 2 new antibiotics in the past 40 or so years I believe… Most of the last discoveries happened in the late 60s / early 70s, so before my mum was born!!

      the reasons for this are 1) all of the low hanging fruit has been taken (so new antibiotics are harder to discover) and 2) there wasn’t much money to be made from new drugs so companies stopped research (though this has changed now!)

      Despite everything, it will just make researchers begin looking for a new generation of treatments for bacterial infections! There are lots of exciting ways people plan on doing this… such as new drugs that are not based on natural molecules, and so shouldn’t have any resistance mechanisms evolved!

      Steve

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