The medical progress of the last century is in peril. The threat? The rise of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics.
“Cancer therapy, surgeries, maternal health — all the medical advances since the 1940s are predicated on the use of antibiotics,” says Dr. Cezar Khursigara, a researcher in Molecular and Cellular Biology whose work on antibiotic resistance was recently published in the journal mSystems.
The threat is particularly acute for people with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease in which mucus accumulates in the lungs, providing the ideal breeding grounds for harmful bacteria to proliferate.
“People with cystic fibrosis have a defective membrane protein that affects the movement of solutes in and out of cells,” explains Khursigara. “By the time they reach their early twenties, Pseudomonas aeruginosa becomes the dominant pathogen in their lungs and remains so for the rest of their lives.”
Pseudomonas infections — whether in the lung or elsewhere — are often treated with beta-lactam antibiotics, a class of crucial first-line antibiotics related to penicillin. They work by weakening the cell walls of bacteria to the point where it is no longer viable.
However, most research into antibiotic resistance relies on laboratory strains of P. aeruginosa, which do not behave the same way as those found in people with infections. Khursigara’s group honed in on these differences by comparing a common laboratory strain of P. aeruginosa with strains isolated from patients. Read more here.