New antibiotic discovered from a pile of dirt!

Aplastic storage crate filled with backyard dirt might have yielded the most powerful antibiotic discovered in decades. Employing a novel microfluidic device to grow soil bacteria, researchers in Boston and Bonn, Germany, say they have identified a new type of antibiotic that kills the bacteria that cause pneumonia, staph, and blood infections.

The antibiotic, named teixobactin, has yet to be tested in people. But it cured mice of these infections, and it is so different from current antibiotics that the scientists, who reported their findings, said they hoped germs might never become resistant to it. Others said resistance to any antibiotic is inevitable, but they called the discovery important nonetheless. “There are lots of unanticipated surprises still lurking in the soil,” says Gerald Fink, a microbiologist at the Whitehead Institute, part of MIT.

Natural defences
Other important antibiotics, including tetracycline and streptomycin, were also discovered in soil bacteria. But starting in the 1960s, it looked as if the earth might not give up any more of its natural defences. That is because most soil germs can’t be grown in the lab and studied.

Scientists switched to other approaches, but very few new classes of antibiotics
have been discovered. With antibiotic resistance increasingly common, last year the WHO predicted that this “discovery void” could lead to a post-antibiotic era, in which minor injuries and common infections could become killers again.

The researchers discovered teixobactin using a new technology for soil pros-pecting that was developed by Slava Epstein, a biologist at Northeastern University in Boston. He devised a two-inch-long microfluidic chip that acts as a portable diffusion chamber.

Tricks & trials
“Essentially, we’re tricking the bacteria,” says Kim Lewis, the director of the Antimicrobial Discovery Center at Northeastern University, who led the research. He says his team was able to grow colonies of bacteria robust enough to be transferred to a petri dish, where they could be tested to see if they produced antibiotics. “The bottleneck in growing bacteria is to achieve that first colony. Once that happens, they become domesticated,” he says.

Teixobactin appears to kill bacteria by binding to a fat molecule that is a building block of their cell walls. That’s an unusual mechanism, says Tanja Schneider, a researcher at the University of Bonn who worked on the project. Bacteria might not easily develop resistance to it, if ever.

Resistance debates
Other scientists say it is unlikely any drug could outwit bacteria indefinitely. “There’s not one single example where resistance hasn’t occurred,” says Henry Chambers, director of clinical research services at the University of California and an expert on antimicrobial resistance with the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

Still, if it proves safe to use in people, teixobactin could provide a fresh weapon to doctors. Lewis says it will take about two years before the drug can be tested in volunteers.