A team of Queensland scientists has found a way to fight superbugs using the bacteria’s own sugar.
University of Queensland scientists said new antibiotics that were unlikely to develop resistance were urgently needed to combat the rise of superbugs — drug-resistant bacteria.
The new compound acts as a Trojan horse, disguising itself as a bacteria’s own sugar, before stopping the bacteria from the inside.
Professor Matt Cooper from the University of Queensland said the compound was not sucrose, but instead a unique type of sugar.
“It’s a tricky one — it’s not sucrose, not the sugar that you’d have that does cause a lot of damage to human health,” he said.
“This is a sugar that is made by the bacterium [itself], so it’s a special type of sugar.
“If you like, it’s the mortar that the bacteria uses to make a wall around itself.
“If you’ve got these elements that keep the bacteria together, this is mortar that sticks the bricks of that wall together.”
It was just like a Trojan horse – the bacterium was expecting to find its own sugar … which it could use to build its wall, but when it finds our compound, it stops the enzyme working.
Professor Matt Cooper
Professor Cooper said researchers had taken the sugar that the bacteria made and changed it chemically so it actually “turned into a weapon against the bacteria in the cells”.
“We looked at the shape of this molecule and created a library of chemicals and compounds that are very similar in shape and size to the sugar,” he said.
He said a new compound then did an inside job.
“We then fed it back to the bacteria itself and the bacteria has these enzymes that if you like, is the brickies’ labourer putting the bricks together using this sugar mortar,” he said.
“And what happened is our particular molecule went into this enzyme and blocked it.
“It was just like a Trojan horse — the bacterium was expecting to find its own sugar … which it could use to build its wall, but when it finds our compound, it stops the enzyme working and the brickies’ labourer goes on strike.”
While the substance was far from finished, Professor Cooper said it was a promising step.
“There’s a lot more work to be done, but people have tried for a long time to make a drug based on this particular sugar made by the bacterium,” he said.
“If we can make a successful compound that can be given to people that are sick with superbug infections, there is a chance we could have an antibiotic that could last a long, long time.
“That’ll be extremely valuable to society and to human health because we know that when we use most antibiotics, resistance arises soon thereafter.
“We hope this is another step forward to understand this particular type of sugar and how we can make a potential compound that could last 20 or 30 years or even longer.”
The research has been published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.