Drugs to combat superbugs

‘will soon be useless’
 

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
(Filed: 01/03/2005)

The world may run out of effective antibiotics by the end of this decade and faces a gap of at least five years before new drugs can be developed to combat superbugs, according to one of the world’s most influential scientists.

The warning that the age of infectious disease control is almost over has come from Prof George Poste, Director of the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University and an advisor to the US president.

“Frankly, most governments are asleep at the switch,” said Prof Poste. He predicts that from 2010 to 2015 will be a “window of vulnerability” when the toll of the superbug will reach its peak as a result of antibiotic resistance.

“We are facing a relentless increase in antibiotic resistance across all classes of drug,” said Prof Poste, who began his 40-year career in Britain. The superbugs of most concern are strains of MRSA, methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus.

Last week, it emerged that deaths caused by MRSA in British hospitals have doubled in four years to almost 1,000 a year. “If we think we have problems today, the problems at the end of the decade will be that much more dramatic,” he told The Telegraph. “We are facing serious challenges.”

The bacterium is resistant to many more antibiotics than methicillin alone. Some strains are now resistant to all common antibiotics - penicillin, cephalosporin, methicillin and its cousin flucloxacillin - as a result of overprescribing of antibiotics, their use in animal feeds, and poor infection control in hospitals compared with measures used in the days before penicillin.

In the mid 1960s, the US Surgeon General said the battle against infectious disease had been won. Even a few years ago, biologists could still turn to the “antibiotic of last resort”, vancomycin.

Now some degree of resistance to vancomycin exists in all MRSA. “Once you have an increasing prevalence of vancomycin resistant Staph, you have limited therapeutic options for those patients,” said Prof Poste.

Meanwhile, he said, half a dozen leading manufacturers of antibiotics have given up developing new types. One reason is that they are unable to profit much from the development of variants on the theme of a given class of antibiotic.

Aside from doing more to reinstate old fashioned infection control, more has to be done to encourage drug companies to create novel classes of antibiotic, he said.