How do you defeat an opponent who has acquired an effective new defence mechanism? Either develop a more powerful weapon, or find a way to undermine his clever new defence device. In the war against superbugs, this is the equivalent of either developing new drugs, or make them susceptible again to existing drugs. Well, now scientists have discovered a way to do this for drug-resistant bacteria that have acquired an ingenious defence mechanism: efflux pumps. These pumps enable the bugs to expel antibiotic drugs from their bodies; that is until a team of chemists from Brown University comes along and blocks their pumps, making them vulnerable again to antibiotics.
Dr Jason K. Sello, assistant professor of chemistry at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island in the US, and colleagues, write about how they synthesized a new compound called BU-005 and used it to block efflux pumps that bacteria use to expel an antibacterial agent called chloramphenicol, in the 15 December issue of Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry.
Sitting in the cell walls or membranes of bacteria, efflux pumps are proteins that spot and expel drugs that breach those membranes. In some cases, the pumps have become so advanced they can recognize and expel drugs with totally different structures and mechanisms.
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