Nature Sub-Journal: A big advance in tuberculosis treatment

Tuberculosis, a deadly infectious disease, the most common treatment is a cocktail of four drugs that must be taken for up to 6 months

Recently, researchers discovered an antibacterial compound that they named evybactin, which can selectively produce effects on Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

Their findings were published in Nature Chemical Biology on August 22, 2022

First author Yu Imai, under the direction of Kim Lewis, a professor at Northeastern University's Antimicrobial Research Center, discovered the new antibiotic: "Microorganisms such as actinomycetes and filamentous fungi have long been used as a source

The discovery led to the idea that Photorhabdus might produce antibiotics that are effective against Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the researchers said

"We used to have this method called differential screening, and it allowed us to exclude antibiotics that might exhibit broad-spectrum or cytotoxic activity at an early stage of screening," Imai said

At the same time, the researchers discovered a new antibiotic, evybactin, a DNA rotational enzyme inhibitor, and they demonstrated that it only targets Mycobacterium tuberculosis

This finding is significant, not only because of the discovery that evybactin can be used to treat tuberculosis without causing the immediate benefit of antibiotic resistance, but also because of the significance of the method of discovering evybactin, which could be used to discover more antibiotics

"In this study, we demonstrated that it is possible to find new antibiotics by using relatively untouched microbes as search sources for

While simple animal experiments have shown that evybactin is active in living organisms, the next steps in this study include further testing Mycobacterium tuberculosis in animals to assess the details

The National Institutes of Health funded the study