New era of multi-component antibiotics as the best strategy to combat the eminent antimicrobial resistance crisis.

New era of multi-component antibiotics as the best strategy to combat the eminent antimicrobial resistance crisis.

The BBC recently aired a compelling documentary on the issue of AMR and the rise in the cases of difficult to treat infections. The main reason for this situation is frequently stated as the overuse and misuse of antibiotics but there is the need to critically examine the biochemical and cellular mechanisms of antimicrobial resistance.

This idea that AMR is mainly due to misuse of antibiotics is only partially right and mainly wrong. The bigger problem is what we classify as antibiotics over the past 70 yrs. All classes of antibiotics are single chemical agents which kill certain bacteria species with high lethality.

The fact that for every antibiotic there exists a bacterial pathogen that is naturally resistant without any prior exposure, makes the generalization of antibiotic-misuse-dogma very problematic. It's possible to discover new classes of antibiotics that have a minimum of two components.

These new classes of multi-components antibiotics can be developed to be both species and strain specific. And also tuned to inhibit the generation of resistance. That is the goal of my laboratory for chemical systems biology @PAKARLab and our work on targeting bacterial genome stability for the discovery of new classes of antibiotics.

The new classes of antibiotics will be both species and strain specific and carefully matched with a variety of regulators and super-regulators of DNA double strand break and repair systems to achieve high efficacy and suppression of the development of resistance mechanisms.

In a way we are taking the position @PAKARLab that there is antibiotic resistance because the antibiotics currently in clinical use are single chemical agents and it’s much easier for resistance mechanisms to evolve. Compared to 2-4 component systems.

We also think that the same 2-4 multi component class of new antibiotics could increase the sensitivity of many hyper-resistant bacterial pathogens to some of the good old classes of antibiotics.