Common treatments are progressively less effective in the combat of bacterial infection because of the antibiotic resistance, but the result of a study could help fight the rising global problem of bacteria resistant antibiotics. Researchers found out that a known anticonvulsant drug poses potential help in the development of a new sort of antibiotics.
According to the World Health Organization, Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) threatens the effective prevention and treatment of an ever-increasing range of infections caused by bacteria, parasites, viruses and fungi.
Several governments around the world are now giving efforts in order to solve the health problem that is so heightened that it threatens what modern medicine has achieved so far. Another important finding in the report is that the surveillance of antibacterial resistance is not coordinated or harmonized and there are many gaps in information on bacteria of major public health importance.
On a recent study, lamotrigine, an anticonvulsant drug has been found to deem helpful in the development of an antibiotic that will help with the current resistance problem.
The drug works as a chemical inhibitor for the fabrication of bacterial ribosomes. Ribosomes are the molecular machines that enable cells to make proteins. Where proteins are not made, the bacteria cease to thrive and thus multiply while developing resistance mechanisms against antibiotics.
While some antibiotics suppress the function of ribosomes, lamotrigine actually block and cease them in their courses.
Mr. Eric Brown, principal investigator of the study and a professor of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences at McMaster's Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research said that "ribosome suppress antibiotics that have been routinely used for more than 50 years to treat bacterial infections, but inhibitors of bacterial ribosome assembly have waited to be discovered."
Dr. Brown further said that "such molecules would be an entirely new class of antibiotics, which would get around antibiotic resistance of many bacteria and that lamotrigine works."
The team successfully identifies lamotrigine's target within the bacteria, which allow researchers to better understand how ribosomes assemble themselves and how lamotrigine can be best used.