We find ourselves at a difficult moment in the world of healthcare, as an increase in antibiotics resistant bacterial infections is turning into a serious health crisis. That is why so many researchers are applying themselves at finding new therapeutic solutions to help get better results, by adding them to standard-of-care antibiotics.
GmPcides: A New Class of Antibiotics
As researchers looked for new ways to fight multidrug-resistant Gram-positive pathogens, using their multi-mode microplate reader, to analyze and understand if their solutions worked, they looked not only to create new antibiotics, but also to provide additional help to the standard-of-care antibiotics, that are already on the market. It is this strategy that has finally led them towards this new class of antibiotics called GmPcides. It was proven in laboratories that they are able to stop the growth of dividing and kill stationary phase nondividing enterococcal cells, effectively. From that moment on, it was possible for scientists to diversify their search, in order to look for ways of accompanying the traditional antibiotics. It led them to uncovering that by adding these GmPcides to standard-of-care antibiotics, they were able to combat a variety of multidrug-resistant bacteria. To summarize, let us say that researchers have confirmed that GmPcides, either combined with standard-of-care antibiotics or not, can fight infections that are cause by Gram-positive bacteria.
The Situation was becoming Catastrophic
The bell was rung loud and clear in 2019, when close to 5 million deaths worldwide were associated to antimicrobial resistance (AMR), in common pathogens. The studies that were produced showed that if nothing was done, we were heading for about 10 million deaths, by the year 2050, caused by AMR. The problem lies in the fact that for over thirty years, antibiotics were basically derived form only a few existing chemical structures. If you go all the way back to 1980, you will find very few new classes of antibiotics, at least those that have been clinically approved for treatments. The three main ones were: oxazolidinones (1987), lipopeptides (1987), and antimycobacterial diarylquinolines (2004). The problem is that study shows that these antibiotics are already suffering from resistance inside the human body. In other words, we reached a point where it has become urgent to discover new solutions, if we want to be able to help people survive Gram-positive pathogens.
The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) has reported in 2019 that 18 AMR bacterial and fungal pathogens were being considered as “urgent, serious, or concerning threats.” Just the most important one (belonging to the species Enterococcus faecalis and Enterococcus faecium) are causing over 100,000 deaths per year in the United States and are costing close to $30 billion in healthcare.
Much have been said, throughout the last decades, about the fact that too many antibiotics were prescribed to patients uselessly, and that it would end-up creating resistance in humans. Now that we face this reality, we can only hope that scientists, helped by the technology of multi-mode microplate reader, will be able to work fast, to find new solutions, such as the GmPcides antibiotics.