OU team develops new antibiotic to fight MRSA

Rice and team have been able to invigorate older drugs from the penicillin family by combining them with BPEI. Credit: University of Oklahoma

Charles Rice, principal investigator and professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, OU College of Arts and Sciences, with team members Robert Cichewicz and Daniel Glatzhofer, both OU chemistry professors, has been able to invigorate older drugs from the penicillin family by combining them with BPEI. While this new formulation requires FDA approval, the approach restores efficacy to obsolete antibiotics.

“The use of first-line antibiotics to kill MRSA or other infectious bacteria will improve patient outcomes and lower the economic burden,” Rice said. “The discovery in our laboratory has made it possible to create an effective antibiotic that can reduce expensive hospitalization costs.”

Leading up to the discovery, Rice was working in his laboratory when he discovered a way to neutralize the MRSA bacteria so that it is no longer resistant to methicillin. This method can be used to neutralize other infectious bacteria.

The takeaway from these experiments is that any number of penicillin-type drugs combined with BPEI or related polymers could create a new first-line drug for treating infectious diseases and change how MRSA and other infectious bacteria are treated.

The Centers for Disease Control considers MRSA a serious threat to human health. MRSA infected 80,500 people in 2011 and nearly one in seven cases resulted in death. When MRSA colonies invade host tissue, they release toxins that cause tissue injury leading to patient morbidity.

Until now, more costly and highly toxic antibiotics of last resort were used to treat MRSA. The new first-line combo drug developed at OU by Rice and his team has the potential to change how patients with MRSA are treated.

Funding for this research was provided by the National Institutes of Health and the University of Oklahoma. The Journal of Antibiotics has published a paper on the OU-developed first-line combo drug to treat deadly infectious bacteria, such as MRSA.

For more information about the development of this new combo drug, please contact Rice at rice@ou.edu. The Rice laboratory is located in the Stephenson Life Sciences Research Center on the OU Research Campus in Norman, Oklahoma.

Media Contact

Jana Smith
jana.smith@ou.edu
405-325-1322

 @ouresearch

http://www.ou.edu 

Media Contact

Jana Smith EurekAlert!

All latest news from the category: Life Sciences and Chemistry

Articles and reports from the Life Sciences and chemistry area deal with applied and basic research into modern biology, chemistry and human medicine.

Valuable information can be found on a range of life sciences fields including bacteriology, biochemistry, bionics, bioinformatics, biophysics, biotechnology, genetics, geobotany, human biology, marine biology, microbiology, molecular biology, cellular biology, zoology, bioinorganic chemistry, microchemistry and environmental chemistry.

Back to home

Comments (0)

Write a comment

Newest articles

Lighting up the future

New multidisciplinary research from the University of St Andrews could lead to more efficient televisions, computer screens and lighting. Researchers at the Organic Semiconductor Centre in the School of Physics and…

Researchers crack sugarcane’s complex genetic code

Sweet success: Scientists created a highly accurate reference genome for one of the most important modern crops and found a rare example of how genes confer disease resistance in plants….

Evolution of the most powerful ocean current on Earth

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current plays an important part in global overturning circulation, the exchange of heat and CO2 between the ocean and atmosphere, and the stability of Antarctica’s ice sheets….

Partners & Sponsors