The World Health Organization recently declared that resistance to antimicrobial therapeutics is one of the top 10 global threats in terms of public health.
As indicated in a Phys.org report, researchers at Monash University have found a possible way to prevent antibiotic resistance and lessen the intake of such drugs.
Essentially, antibacterial resistance takes place when pathogens including viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi are changing over time and do not respond to medicines anymore, and thus infections turn increasingly difficult or even impossible to cure.
The said research has shown that the use of nanoparticles combined with other antibiotics, is an effective technique to enhance microbial killing.
Also according to the WHO, antibiotics are turning out to be increasingly ineffective as drug resistance spreads worldwide, resulting in it, being more difficult to cure infections and death.
New antimicrobials are instantaneously needed. For instance, to treat carbapenem-resistant gram-negative microbial infections as identified in the priority pathogen list of the health organization.
Nevertheless, if people do not change the manner they are using antibiotics, these new drugs will experience a similar fate as the existing ones and turn out to be ineffective.
Combating Multidrug-Resistant Microbes
The paper, A polytherapy based approach to combat antimicrobial resistance using cubosomes, published in Nature Communications, makes an essential new contribution to the field of antibacterial resistance, discovering a new way ahead to combat multidrug-resistant microbes.
According to the study's lead researcher Dr. Hsin-Hui Shen, this is a spectacular result in the manner medicine is delivered and how the drugs people take affect them in the future.
Dr. Shen, from the Monash University Department of Materials Science and Engineering, the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute, and the Department of Microbiology's Professor Jian Li, have presented that nanoparticle-based polytherapy treatments disrupt the external membrane of superbug bacteria, and provide an enhanced substitute to the conventional use of loading the antibiotic within lipid nanoparticles.
The lead researcher explained, when bacteria become resistant, the original antibiotic cannot kill them anymore. He also said that rather than looking for antibiotics to fight superbugs, the nanotechnology approach can be used to lessen the dose of antibiotic intake, effectively destroying multidrug-resistant organisms.
No New Antibiotic Discovered in the Past 30 Years
The WHO verified that there has been no new antibiotic discovered in the last three decades, although worldwide, there is a crisis of antibiotic resistance.
Meaning, in the coming years, more people are likely to die because of basic infections since they have developed antibacterial resistance.
Moreover, the health organization also said, the cost of antimicrobial resistance to the economy is substantial. More so, minus the effective antimicrobials, the success of today's medicine in treating infections, which includes during major surgery and cancer chemotherapy, would be at amplified or heightened risk.
For quite some time now, nanoparticles have been used particularly as antimicrobial carriers, although the use of nanoparticles in polytherapy therapeutics with antibiotics in order to overcome resistance to antimicrobial drugs has been overlooked.
Additionally, the use of nanoparticles-antibiotics combination treatment could reduce the dose intake in the human body, not to mention overcome the multidrug resistance. The study will now progress to the testing stage.
Related information about antibiotics fighting superbugs is shown on Technion's YouTube video below:
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