New research - A way to beat MRSA???

[gwenith, BSN, RN]

Antibiotic-boosting drug kills superbugs

18:11 15 October 04 A UK company claims to have discovered a compound that renders the MRSA superbug vulnerable to the antibiotic it normally resists.

MRSA - methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus - is defined by its ability to resist the antibiotic methicillin. Like penicillin, methicillin works by blocking bacterial enzymes called PBPs, which normally strengthen cell walls by forming cross links.

The first MRSA strains appeared in 1961, just two years after methicillin was launched. These bacteria got their resistance by picking up the gene for another PBP enzyme, PBP2a, to which methicillin cannot bind.

MRSA strains now cause up to 60% of all "staph" infections in some hospitals. Some MRSA strains are also becoming resistant to other antibiotics - including vancomycin, the antibiotic doctors resort to when nothing else works.

But Michael Levey's team at Pharmaceutica in Worcestershire, UK, may have discovered a way to restore methicillin's killing power. Following on from work done in the 1990s, his team found that certain compounds containing the amino acid glycine greatly increased 20 different MRSA strains' susceptibility to methicillin. The dose needed to kill them dropped from 256 milligrams per litre to just 4 mg/l.

Mysterious workings

The problem was that the concentrations of these glycine compounds had to be very high. "You cannot drown yourself in glycine to treat infection," points out Brigitte Berger-Bachi at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Then Levey got lucky. He learned of another glycine compound that has already been approved for human use in diagnostic tests. Lab tests show that the compound, which Levey calls BTA19976a, makes MRSA susceptible to methicillin at concentrations regarded as safe

More here:- http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996522

[Judy Keen]

This is very interesting, I am going to do some research on this, can you share where you found this information. I am seeing more and more community acquired MRSA and in atypical populations, 9% of all the MRSA isolates this year have been in the birth to 12 yr age range and 26% in the 20-40 yr. age range. I have, in the past, typically seen MRSA in the elderly population. These are all isolated from wounds (i.e., cellulitis, spider bites). Anyway, it has finally awakened the medical staff that we need to put forth efforts to prevent and/or control drug resistance. This would be interesting to share with physicians.

More here:- http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996522

[gwenith, BSN, RN]

The trouble with a popular science magazine like New Scientist is that it does not always link to actual articles but if you searched Medline or Pubmed with the researchers name I am sure you will find more information.

But Michael Levey's team at Pharmaceutica in Worcestershire, UK, may have discovered a way to restore methicillin's killing power. Following on from work done in the 1990s, his team found that certain compounds containing the amino acid glycine greatly increased 20 different MRSA strains' susceptibility to methicillin. The dose needed to kill them dropped from 256 milligrams per litre to just 4 mg/l.

Otherwise I guess we just have to wait until Pharmacuetica comes out with the finished product.