For years, doctors have been sounding the alarm that humans are losing the fight against bacteria, that our overuse and misuse of antibiotics has caused various dangerous microbes to become resistant to the usual drugs used to fight them.
Developing new drugs has proven difficult and expensive, which is why a team at a Canadian lab is taking a different approach, turning to old drugs to see if they can be used in new ways.
Microbiologist and biochemistry professor Eric Brown and his team at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont. are working on screening existing drugs and compounds to see if any can become new weapons against superbugs.
Brown explains that the process begins by looking through McMaster鈥檚 library of chemicals and more than 2,000 off-patent drugs. Tests are then run to see if any of the compounds show hidden, or 鈥渃ryptic,鈥� bacteria-fighting activity.
鈥淚t鈥檚 a needle in a haystack approach to find something that would be a lead for a new drug,鈥� Brown told CTV鈥檚 Your Morning on Friday.
Robotic technology is brought in to screen a large number of compounds at once to find these hidden germ-fighting abilities.
鈥淲e run experiments to find cryptic activities in these compounds -- for example, the ability to augment the activity of existing antibiotics that might be less effective because of drug resistance,鈥� he said.
The hope is not that they will discover a brand new antibiotic -- which is highly unlikely -- but that they will discover that a drug or compound can be combined with other drugs to create a combination that is difficult for bacteria to evade. This multi-drug, 鈥渃ocktail鈥� approach is one that has worked successfully to control HIV, though it took years of experimentation to find the combination that would suppress the retrovirus.
Normally, randomly screening vast numbers of drug combinations would take years, but thanks to modern technology, Brown and his team are able to screen hundreds of compounds in a single day.
Brown admits it鈥檚 an unusual method.
鈥淥ur approach is really to do the weird stuff that鈥檚 not done by pharmaceutical or biotech companies,鈥� he said, adding it鈥檚 the best way to find drugs that were shelved or abandoned before their full potential was discovered.
It鈥檚 been decades since a completely new class of antibiotics was discovered. While some of the antibiotics we already know have been tweaked to stay ahead of resistance, 鈥渞esistance is never far behind that tweaking,鈥� Brown says.
What鈥檚 exciting about turning to old, well-known, already-approved drugs is that it gives researchers the ability to leapfrog the usual drug regulatory process.
鈥淥n average, believe it or not, it takes something like 13 to 15 years to develop a drug. That鈥檚 from early discoveries to completed clinical trials,鈥� says Brown.
鈥淭he clinical trials period is about half of that. So if we can leapfrog over the discovery phases and move into pre-clinical with this sort of approach, it鈥檚 possible to cut that time, perhaps in half.鈥�
