Can We Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria With Non-Antibiotic Drugs? (economist.com)

Slashdot reader Bruce66423 shares what researchers learned by studying the effect of drugs on bacteria in the gut: The research reveals that it's not just antibiotics that have the effect of causing resistance to antibiotics. "Of the drugs in the study, 156 were antibacterials (144 antibiotics and 12 antiseptics). But a further 835, such as painkillers and blood-pressure pills, were not intended to harm bacteria. Yet almost a quarter (203) did....

"However, Dr Maier's study also brings some good news for the fight against antimicrobial resistance. Some strains she looked at which were resistant to antibiotics nevertheless succumbed to one or more of the non-antibiotic drugs thrown at them. This could be a starting point for the development of new antimicrobial agents which would eliminate bacteria that have proved intractable to other means."
Every drug the researchers tested has already been approved for human use -- which means they could all eventually be used as a second wave of antibiotics.

Comments

Phages

[Archtech]

Bacteriophages are a good partial answer. Viruses that prey on and destroy specific bacteria, they have some great advantages along with their limitations.

On the plus side, they are tailored for one specific strain of bacterium and kill those alone. What's more, they usually kill virtually all of them. Then the viruses have nothing to attack, and go dormant. There is no question - as far as I know, so far - of bacteria developing resistance. The phage's attack is extremely basic - rather like an anti-tank shot. They just bore into the bacterium, commandeer its DNA and start churning out more phages.

Also, the specificity means that a phage is extremely focused in its effects. None of the huge overkill of antibiotics, which - as their name implies - are pretty hostile to all living material.

The downside is significant, but manageable. Each phage kills only one type of bacterium, so you need to create a library of phages. An institute in Tbilisi, Georgia had such a library in Soviet times; I don't know how much of its stock has survived. It could be built up again at fairly low cost.

Since the bacteria against which antibiotics fail are quite few in number so far, it should be feasible to develop phages fast enough to keep up with them.

Perhaps the biggest problem lies in the absence of vast undeserved profits. That's the main reason why the Western world went overboard on antibiotics in the first place, leading to undeserved neglect of other antibacterial techniques.