Danish researchers discover new drug to fight multi-resistant bacteria

Danish researchers said Friday they have invented a new drug that can be used to cure such diseases as multi-resistant staphylococcus, resistant tuberculosis and resistant salmonella-typhus. The researchers said they have received a patent for the drug which can make multi-resistant bacteria sensitive to antibiotics again. This means patients can be cured by standard antibiotics that bacteria were previously resistant to, after the new drug has been administered. The key to the new drug's discovery lies in a treatment traditionally used to treat schizophrenia, the researchers said. "One has long known that psychoactive drugs have an antibiotic effect," said Oliver Hendricks, a post-doctoral fellow at University of Southern Denmark and one of the researchers behind the discovery. "We have isolated that particular effect from the rest of the (psychoactive) drug, and the result is a product that can make resistant bacteria susceptible (to drugs) again," he told Danish science news website Videnskab.dk. The new drug, named JEK47, functions by affecting the resistant bacteria's outer cell membrane and prevents the cellular pumps, which flush antibiotics out of bacteria cells, from functioning correctly. In effect, it prevents bacteria from pumping out the antibiotic once it is inside the cell. Treatment by JEK47 must be followed-up by regular antibiotic treatments, which can kill the bacteria that are now no-longer drug-resistant thanks to the new drug. Until now, the effect of JEK47 has been documented against staphylococci and salmonella in mice. But researches have shown that the drug Thioridazin, which is the base chemical preparation for JEK47, has an effect on humans who have contracted multi-resistant tuberculosis. While psychoactive drugs are known to have serious side effects, Hendricks said the purification of JEK47 from the original Thioridazin, removes this danger. "We have removed that part of the drug which affected the brain. By doing that we have removed 80 to 85 percent of side effects," he told Videnskab.dk. JEK47 has been subjected to several tests and is now approved as a drug for combination therapy against multi-resistant bacteria in Europe. The researchers believe the drug can be on sale within the next two years. Resistant tuberculosis and staphylococci are major, global health threats. Pulmonary tuberculosis, which affects the lungs, kills around 2 million people every year, while resistant staphylococci (MRSA) is a serious hazard to hospital patients.