BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) - Researchers at LSU are discovering a way to fight back against drug-resistant bacteria through a new medicine.
Nearly five million people globally died in 2019 after getting an infection antibiotics could not fix, according to PubMed. Mario Rivera, a chemistry professor at LSU, has been working for the past 10 years on a new type of medicine that can fight against bacteria that have grown resistant to current antibiotics.
"One of the big problems with antibiotics today is that bacteria have developed resistance to antibiotics. There's also not a very plentiful pipeline of new antibiotics, and that really is becoming a serious problem to treat resistant infections," Rivera said.
Rivera says bacteria can rapidly evolve. Couple that with the misuse of antibiotics and the lack of new ones to keep up, and we have strong bacteria that medicine cannot touch -- which is why he came up with a way to starve it.
"Since we've been here, we've discovered small molecules which wedged themselves into the large molecule, causing the smaller molecule that tries to bind to just bounce off and so that leads to the iron starvation that eventually leads to the cell death," Rivera said.
In his lab at LSU, he and a small group of student scientists are testing those small molecules that could eventually be used to create a new class of antibiotics -- one that can fight against drug-resistant bacteria.
"These molecules are going to interrupt processes which other antibiotics haven't interrupted in the past meaning that the development of resistance is not necessarily already placed in bacteria," Rivera said.
If this research pans out and is eventually approved by the FDA, it could mean good news for people with chronic infections that sometimes lead to amputation. But, he says there is still more work to be done.
"That's a little bit in the future, we still while we are working with the molecules and validating them. We are also investigating other aspects of our metabolism and coming up with different types of structures in the small molecules themselves, so it's hard to predict which one will make it, and that's typical in drug discovery," Rivera said.
A medical breakthrough from an LSU lab that could bring relief and an answer to millions of people. Rivera says the team is still at least five years away from being able to test this in humans, but says the research now is promising.
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