An international team of researchers used historical museum collections to study the effects of human-made antibiotics over the entire history of their application.
Expert Q&A: Do breakthrough cases mean we will soon need COVID boosters? The extremely contagious Delta variant continues to spread, prompting mask mandates, proof of vaccination, and other measures. Media invited to ask the experts about these and related topics.
Wellcome Trust has provided a grant to the National University of Singapore to establish the Asian Clinical Research Network to conduct antimicrobial clinical research to develop the most effective ways to treat and prevent life-threatening drug-resistant infections. This will be the first clinical trial network established in Asia focusing on drug-resistant infections.
They’re roughly the same size as a coronavirus particle, and 1000 times smaller than a human hair, yet newly engineered nanoparticles developed by scientists at the University of South Australia, are punching well above their weight when it comes to treating drug-resistant fungal infections.
Published research by Indiana University professor Jay Lennon's lab shows how bacteria can overcome starvation situations and survive for a long time, which has broader implications for chronic infections.
In a proof-of-concept study, researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have created a coating that can be applied to endotracheal tubes and release antimicrobial peptides that target infectious bacteria with specificity. The innovation could reduce upper-airway bacterial inflammation during intubation, a situation that can lead to chronic inflammation and a condition called subglottic stenosis, the narrowing of the airway by an accumulation of scar tissue. The findings were published recently in the journal The Laryngoscope.
During ACA's 71st annual meeting, Celia Schiffer, from the University of Massachusetts, will talk about her lab's work with virus substrate recognition as a method to avoid drug resistance. Schiffer and her team expanded their work on HIV and the hepatitis C virus to include human T-cell lymphotropic virus type 1 and SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and discovered that designing robust inhibitors to fit within the substrate envelope tips this balance toward decreasing the probability of resistance.
One type of the salmonella bacteria is much more likely to cause disease and fend off frontline antibiotics when acquired in Europe, Asia, and parts of Africa rather than domestically in the United States.
An untapped trove of desirable drug-like molecules is hidden in the genomes of Streptomyces bacteria — the same bacteria responsible for the first bacterial antibiotics to treat tuberculosis back in the 1940s. Isolating them, however, has proved challenging. Now, biologists at Washington University in St. Louis are using comparative metabologenomics to try to uncover what may be “silencing” Streptomyces and preventing it from producing desirable compounds encoded by its genes.
Researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have developed a novel method for producing new antibiotics to combat resistant bacteria. Through an approach that would target bacteria with an antibiotic that is masked by a prodrug, which the bacteria would themselves remove, the researchers identified a method that would allow for development of new, effective antibiotics that could overcome issues of resistance. The findings were published today in eLife.
Resistance to antibiotics is common and often deadly among children with pneumonia in Bangladesh, according to a new study coauthored by researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) with colleagues at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (abbreviated as icddr,b).
In what turned out to be one of the most important accidents of all time, Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming returned to his laboratory after a vacation in 1928 to find a clear zone surrounding a piece of mold that had infiltrated a petri dish full of Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus), a common skin bacterium he was growing.
Antibiotic sales soared during India’s first surge of COVID-19, suggesting that the drugs were inappropriately used to treat mild and moderate COVID-19 infections, according to research led by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The excessive usage is especially concerning because antibiotic overuse increases the risk for drug-resistant infections — not just in India, but worldwide.
A new study by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researchers has given scientists their first look at the genomic landscape of tumors that have grown resistant to drugs targeting the abnormal KRASG12C protein. Their work shows that, far from adopting a common route to becoming resistant, the cells take a strikingly diverse set of avenues, often several at a time. The findings, reported online today in the New England Journal of Medicine, underscore the need for new drugs that inhibit KRAS differently than current agents do.
A study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis suggests that many, but not all, COVID-19 therapies made from combinations of two antibodies are effective against a wide range of virus variants, and that combination therapies appear to prevent the emergence of drug resistance.
Research reveals that phage viruses that undergo special evolutionary training increase their capacity to subdue bacteria. The results provide hope for the antibiotic resistance crisis, a rising threat as deadly bacteria continue to evolve to render many modern drugs ineffective.
Research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis shows that international travelers often return home with new bacterial strains jostling for position among the thousands that normally reside within the gut microbiome. Such travel is contributing to the rapid global increase and spread of antimicrobial resistance.
New research from the University of Georgia suggests a component of bacteria’s cell walls may hold the key to crushing the antibiotic-resistant microbes.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIAID, part of the National Institutes of Health, NIH, has awarded $2.5 million in grants to support research on bacteriophage therapy, and Texas A&M AgriLife Research is among the grant recipients.
For centuries, people in Baltic nations have used ancient amber for medicinal purposes. Now, scientists report compounds that help explain its therapeutic effects and that could lead to new medicines to combat antibiotic-resistant infections. They will present their results at ACS Spring 2021.
Sabrina L. Spencer, PhD, is a CU Boulder researcher and CU Cancer Center member. Spencer recently won the Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Award and the Emerging Leader Award. She will use the grants to continue her research on drug resistance in cancer cells.
Researchers from Cancer Science Institute of Singapore at NUS and A*STAR’s Genome Institute of Singapore as well as their collaborators have discovered the molecular pathway that interferes with breast cancer drugs, and found an additional drug that will reverse the effect. This discovery could give cancer patients more hope of overcoming the disease.
Diphtheria - a relatively easily-preventable infection - is evolving to become resistant to a number of classes of antibiotics and in future could lead to vaccine escape, warn an international team of researchers from the UK and India.
The study in mice, “A Multifaceted Cellular Damage Repair and Prevention Pathway Promotes High Level Tolerance to Beta-lactam Antibiotics,” published Feb. 3 in the journal EMBO Reports, reveals how tolerance occurs, thanks to a system that mitigates iron toxicity in bacteria that have been exposed to penicillin.
A new study identifies a mechanism that makes bacteria tolerant to penicillin and related antibiotics, findings that could lead to new therapies that boost the effectiveness of these treatments.
While most adults over 50 understand that overuse of antibiotics is a problem, and say they’re cautious about taking the drugs, a sizable minority have used antibiotics for something other than their original purpose, and appear to think the drugs could help treat colds, which are caused by viruses not bacteria.
Iowa State University researchers received a $1 million grant to study how manure management systems in livestock production may give rise to antibiotic resistance. Human, animal and environmental health interact in complex ways that influence the pace at which antibiotic resistance spreads, and the researchers hope their work will shed light on these connections.
In a new article featured on this month’s cover of Cancer Research, Moffitt Cancer Center researchers, in collaboration with Oxford University, report results from their study using mathematical modeling to show that cell turnover impacts drug resistance and is an important factor that governs the success of adaptive therapy.
Chu-Young Kim, Ph.D., associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at The University of Texas at El Paso, is helping combat the threat of superbugs – illnesses caused by drug-resistant bacteria – by returning to nature.
His work is supported by a $1.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a biological method for producing new versions of current antibiotics that have become ineffective due to resistance
For Michigan State University’s Felicia Wu, the surprise isn’t that people who work with livestock are at higher risk of picking up antibiotic-resistant bacteria, but instead how much higher their risk levels are.
“This is a bit of a wakeup call,” said Wu, John. A Hannah Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Food Science and Human Nutrition and Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics. “I don’t think there was much awareness that swine workers are at such high risk, for example. Or that large animal vets are also at extremely high risk.”
A new vaccine development platform has proven effective in protecting against deadly, hard-to-treat infections caused by multi-drug resistant (MDR) bacteria, thanks to a collaborative endeavor led by Dr. Michael J. Daly, a professor in the Uniformed Services University's (USU) Department of Pathology, Dr. Gregory J. Tobin, president of Biological Mimetics, Inc., and Dr. Daniel Zurawski at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. This could ultimately help prevent battlefield infections, as well as common hospital-acquired infections in patients undergoing routine surgeries.
Pathogenic bacteria in humans are developing resistance to antibiotics much faster than expected. Now, computational research at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, shows that one reason could be significant genetic transfer between bacteria in our ecosystems and to humans. This work has also led to new tools for resistance researchers.
The Monell Chemical Senses Center has received a two-year, $890,000 grant from the Robert J. Kleberg, Jr. and Helen C. Kleberg Foundation. Monell scientists and collaborators will develop a new way to classify fever-inducing diseases using distinct signatures of volatile chemicals from urine and saliva.
Researchers captured and comparted hi-res images of ribosome structures from sensitive and resistant bacteria and report that a water molecule needed for antibiotic binding was not present in the ribosomes from the drug-resistant bugs.
Princess Margaret Scientist Dr. Catherine O’Brien and team discovered that cancer cells hijack an evolutionary conserved program to survive chemotherapy. Furthermore, the researchers show that novel therapeutic strategies aimed at specifically targeting cancer cells in this slow-dividing state can prevent cancer regrowth.
In 1986, cellular biochemist Kazumitsu Ueda, currently at Kyoto University's Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS), discovered that a protein called ABCB1 could transport multiple chemotherapeutics out of some cancer cells, making them resistant to treatment.
Researchers led by Ludwig San Diego Member Don Cleveland and Peter Campbell of the Sanger Center have solved the mystery of how free-floating circular DNA fragments, which are almost exclusively found in cancer cells, drive gene amplification to generate drug resistance in cancer.
A new device for faster testing of antibiotic-resistant bacteria has been developed by researchers at Binghamton University, State University of New York.
Researchers monitored antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in three Puerto Rican watersheds after Hurricane Maria, finding that the abundance and diversity of ARGs were highest downstream of WWTPs. They report their results in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology.
En un estudio retrospectivo de casos, los investigadores de Mayo Clinic descubrieron una relación entre la administración de antibióticos en niños menores de 2 años y varias enfermedades o afecciones duraderas que oscilaban desde alergias a obesidad. Los resultados están en Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
Children under age 2 who take antibiotics are at greater risk for childhood-onset asthma, respiratory allergies, eczema, celiac disease, obesity and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to a paper written jointly by Mayo Clinic and Rutgers researchers. While previous studies have looked at the association of antibiotics with single diseases, this is the first to look at the association across many diseases.
Understanding the role of antibiotic use patterns and patient transfers in the emergence of drug-resistant microbes is essential to crafting effective prevention strategies, suggests a study published today in eLife.
A rapid and simple method for testing the efficacy of antibacterial drugs on infectious microbes has been developed and validated by a team of Penn State researchers.
Researchers reporting in ACS’ Nano Letters have developed nanoparticles that release bursts of calcium inside tumor cells, inhibiting drug pumps and reversing MDR.
A study aimed at better understanding why some critically ill patients develop multidrug-resistant infections is underway by researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). The multi-institution study will enroll patients at Memorial Hermann Hospital-Texas Medical Center and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.