Are scientists finally beating antimicrobial resistance?

Sub: Science and tech

Sec: Health

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Antimicrobial resistant infections kill millions every year.
They have the potential to take us back to the dark ages, when common infections like urinary tract infections (UTIs) or pneumonia were lethal and untreatable.

What is Antimicrobial Resistance?

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the top global public health and development threats.
An antimicrobial is an agent that kills microorganisms (microbicide) or stops their growth (bacteriostatic agent).
Antimicrobial medicines can be grouped according to the microorganisms they act primarily against.
For example, antibiotics are used against bacteria, and antifungals are used against fungi.
They can also be classified according to their function.
The use of antimicrobial medicines to treat infection is known as antimicrobial chemotherapy, while the use of antimicrobial medicines to prevent infection is known as antimicrobial prophylaxis.
Antimicrobials – including antibiotics, antivirals, antifungals, and antiparasitics – are medicines used to prevent and treat infectious diseases in humans, animals and plants.
Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites no longer respond to antimicrobial medicines.

Using AI to discover new antibiotics:

The study used machine learning to search for potential antibiotic agents in a huge database of microbes which live in environments such as soil, the ocean, and human and animal guts.

Peptide antibiotics effective against bacterial infections:

To find out which of these peptides could be useful as antibiotics, the researchers synthesized 100 peptides and tested them against 11 disease-causing bacterial strains in laboratory dishes.
They found that 79 peptides disrupted bacterial membranes and 63 peptides specifically targeted antibiotic-resistant bacteria, such as Escherichia coli (E.coli) and Staphylococcus aureus.
The researchers also tested the compounds in mice with infected skin abscesses, but only three of the peptides showed antimicrobial effects in vivo (in a living organism).