In Search of an Armor-Busting Antibiotic

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Drug-resistant germs are big killers. The World Health Organization estimates that infections caused by drug-resistant microbes help kill close to five million people a year, a number that’s expected to grow. 

The world needs new antibiotics, but bacteria are outwitting scientists and drug developers at every turn.  

Microbes can produce complex molecules, such as antibiotics, to protect themselves from other organisms. And they naturally develop survival mechanisms to fight these molecules, including swapping genetic material among themselves. On top of that, continuous exposure from our own use of antibiotics contributes to the inevitable rise of bacteria that can survive even the newest antibiotics. 

Among the biggest killers are Gram-negative bacteria, which are also harder to fight because of their extra layers of protection – or armor, as Dr. Skyler Cochrane, a research scholar at Duke University, calls it.

Gram-negative bacteria cause plague, cholera, whooping cough, salmonella, typhoid fever, and urinary tract infections, and are the root of many pneumonia and bloodstream infections. 

Cochrane is working in a lab that is looking for chinks in the armor of Gram-negative bacteria. 

In this episode of One World, One Health, listen as she talks about a promising new compound that might just offer the first new weapon against these bacteria in decades.