New Approach Could Lower Antibiotic Requirements By 50 Times

Antibiotic doses could be reduced by up to 50 times using a new approach based on bacteriophages

Steven Hagens, previously at the University of Vienna, told Chemistry & Industry, the magazine of the SCI, that certain bacteriophages, a type of virus that infects bacteria, can boost the effectiveness of antibiotics gentamicin, gramacidin or tetracycline.

It is the phages’ ability to channel through bacterial cell membranes that boosts antibiotic effectiveness. ‘Pseudomonas bacteria for example are particularly multi-resistant to antibiotics because they have efflux pump mechanisms that enable them to throw out antibiotics. A pore in the cell wall would obviously cancel the efflux effect,’ Hagens explains.

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This entry was posted on February 26, 2007 at 7:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.