drug resistance

December 20, 20234min readA deep-learning algorithm helped identify new compounds that are effective against antibiotic-resistant infections in mice, opening the door to AI-guided drug discoveryBy Tanya Lewis Antibiotic resistance is among the biggest global threats to human health. It was directly responsible for an estimated 1.27 million deaths in 2019 and contributed to nearly five million more. The problem only got worse during the COVID pandemic. And no new classes of antibiotics have been developed for decades.Now…

Developing new antibiotics presents a complicated challenge, but scientists are now using artificial intelligence to design new drugs to address the problem. In May researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and McMaster University published a study on their use of an AI algorithm to identify an antibiotic that can kill a particularly resistant type of bacterium. The pathogen, called Acinetobacter baumannii, can lead to serious infections, including meningitis and pneumonia, and is often found in hospital…

Experts with the World Health Organization have issued a dire warning about our never-ending battle against dangerous bacteria: The pipeline of new antibiotics, particularly those that can handle drug-resistant bacteria, isrunning dry. Only around two dozen candidates meant to treat important infections are currently thought to be in clinical trials, with even fewer potential drugs that can reliably take on superbugs in development.Mental Health Apps Are a Privacy NightmareThe new WHO report was presented at a special…

As the U.S. health care system weathered blow after blow of the COVID pandemic, diseases of all kinds, from HIV to congenital syphilis, surged across the country. Last week a national survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that outbreaks of emerging drug-resistant fungi also grew at an “alarming” rate in hospitals from 2019 to 2020. Annual cases of the opportunistic, hard-to-treat yeast Candida auris nearly tripled from 476 in 2019 to 1,471 in 2021, according to the CDC’s recent report, which was…

In fact, in the slums of Rio de Janeiro where Mr Peixoto lives, TB is common. The treatment was almost as bad as the disease. Mr Peixoto’s tablets gave him crippling pain in his joints and made him dizzy and anxious. “I couldn’t get up. I was scared of everything, scared to even look out of the window." His thrice-weekly visits to the clinic meant taking time off from his job at the local bakery, pushing him into poverty. Worst of all, his friends and family avoided him for fear of catching the disease.…

Childbirth is a vulnerable experience, both emotionally and physically. Giving birth, whether vaginally or through a cesarean section, creates opportunities for bacteria to infect both the parent and newborn, and sometimes these infections can cause the parent’s immune response to spiral out of control. That extreme response to infection, called sepsis, is the third most common global cause of death during or after childbirth. Millions of cases of maternal sepsis occur each year, mostly in low- and middle-income…

About half of women and more than one in 10 men will get a urinary tract infection (UTI) in their lifetime, with many people experiencing recurrent UTIs. These common bacterial infections, which can lead to painful urination, have been easily treated and cured with antibiotics for decades. But as a result of antibiotic resistance—when bacteria become resistant to the medicines used to treat them—a number of antibiotics routinely employed for UTIs have become ineffective, leading to more severe illness, hospitalizations…

The emergence of disease-causing bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics is often attributed to the overuse of antibiotics in people and livestock. But researchers have homed in on another potential driver of resistance: antidepressants. By studying bacteria grown in the laboratory, a team has now tracked how antidepressants can trigger drug resistance. “Even after a few days exposure, bacteria develop drug resistance, not only against one but multiple antibiotics,” says senior author Jianhua Guo, who works at the…

Our skin is crawling with Staphylococcus aureus, the bacterium responsible for most staph infections. Usually staph is harmless, but sometimes—if it breaks through the barrier of our skin or hitches a ride on our food—it can cause severe rashes, food poisoning and even death. For more than a century researchers and clinicians have attempted to find a way to vaccinate against staph infections to no avail. Now researchers point to one possible explanation: staph knows us all too well. “Staph has developed some type of…

Next, they proved that the bots could swim. In test tubes containing urea, the microbots reached speeds of up to 4 micrometers per second—“one or two body lengths per second,” says Sánchez. (Humans also swim around one body-length per second.)Then it was time to show that the bots could also kill. But the team agonized over how to prove that they could actually treat an animal’s infection better than by just using passive drops of antibiotics. "That took some time," de la Fuente says.In the end, they devised a setup to…