Australian scientists are looking to the past as they work to beat the increasing problem of antibiotic resistance.
Researchers at Monash University are not developing a new class of antibiotics, instead hoping to make an old one, Polymyxin, easier and safer to use.
Lead researcher on the project, Professor Jian Li, says Polymyxins could be the last line of defence for gram-negative superbugs.
“Polymyxin got a really bad reputation in the 1970s because there were quite a few clinical reports saying they have much higher incidence of kidney toxicity or neural toxicity,” Professor Li said.
With the support of a $10 million grant over the next five years from the US government’s National Institute of Health, Professor Li hopes Polymyxin can be “rescued” from its fate as a last-resort treatment.
“At the moment, there is nothing new in the development pipeline,” she said.
Professor of infectious diseases at the Australian National University, Peter Collignon, says researchers are resorting to drugs of the past because there is no financial support to develop new classes of antibiotics.
“They’re really all that we’ve got left because the real problem is there’s not a lot of drugs even being developed against what we call the gram-negatives,” he said.
No incentive for pharmaceutical companies
“We really have to use and preserve what we’ve got from the past and the trouble is that’s probably not going to happen in a hurry either because there really isn’t the reward for pharmaceutical companies to actually develop new drugs that are only used for short periods of time, even though they cure things.”
Professor Collignon says the fact an antibiotic from the past that was shunned for its toxicity is back under development “means we’ve got problems”.
“We’re still really lucky in Australia in that we have much less resistance than a lot of other areas in the world so we know what we have to do,” he said.
“There is a lack of political willingness around the world to do the appropriate things and in the short term, the answer is [to] develop another drug and get over this problem.”
But Professor Collignon says that work is not happening.
“Even if we did do that, we have got to fix the basics because this problem is not going to go away,” he said.
“The reality is in places like China, India, developing countries, we’re already in a post-antibiotic era for a large proportion of common infections and they get brought back to Australia with people who are just [visiting] there.
“So we need to fix this problem and we need to fix it up from an international perspective.”
Professor Collignon says the research and development that is being done at Monash is needed but “we need the basic things approached as well, and enforced by some sort of international code that really makes sure it happens and people don’t just pay lip service to it.”
Source: ABC