Peschel stressed that the research is at a very early stage and the team would need many years of work, ideally with a pharmaceutical company, before a potential new antibiotic medicine could be developed and tested in clinical trials. “It was totally unexpected”, says study author Andreas Peschel.
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S. aureus is found in the noses of around 30% of people, but it’s uncertain how the rest of the population resists colonisation by the bug.
Humans began losing the evolutionary arms race against bacteria nearly as soon as we discovered and started mass producing antibiotics. There are probably more antibiotics yet to be discovered that may explain why the remaining 70 per cent of humans do not carry the staphylococcus aureus bacteria, Lewis wrote. They guessed it might have something to do with neighboring bacteria.
The researchers found that, even in small concentrations, lugdunin was effective against many different kinds of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, including the increasingly common hospital-acquired infection called methicillin-resistant S. aureus, or MRSA. This suggests that in the human nose, S. lugdunensis helps to keep S. aureus at bay, the researchers said. Indeed, one of these bacteria – Staphylococcus lugdunensis – prevented the unsafe pathogen from growing. Its potential to cure infections was demonstrated on S. aureus skin infections in mice. However, according to the published findings, researchers found that only 6 percent of the 187 hospital patients they surveyed who carried the bacteria also carried Staphylococcus aureus, compared to the roughly 34 percent of hospital patients without the bacteria.
Once they had isolated lugdunin, the researchers tested it in the noses of mice that had been dosed with several strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, including S. aureus.
A bacterium that lives in the human nose produces an antibiotic lethal to the MRSA superbug, scientists have discovered.
It’s always been known that bacteria make compounds – called bacteriacin – that attack or inhibit other bacteria in places like the human intestine, he said.
Our own microbiomes may be an untapped reserve of antibiotic sources.
The really important contribution of this study is not lugdunin itself, says microbiologist Kim Lewis of Northeastern University, but rather the new approach for finding antibiotic-producing bacteria within our own bodies.
Scientists kept searching in soil, he says, because they already had some success there and know that soil bacteria are exceptionally good at producing antibiotics.
“(That’s) the reason why we looked at this particular body site.
“The reason we ran out of antibiotics in the first place is because majority came from soil bacteria and they make up 1 percent of the total [bacterial] diversity”, Lewis says.
Naming their new discovery lugdunin, the researchers said it was the first known example of a new class of peptide antibiotics. And the team in Tübingen has only just begun their hunt.
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Asked during a media briefing on Tuesday why others had not looked within the human microbiome for similar leads, Peschel said that perhaps they looked in the wrong places.
