Dunedin researchers discover a way to kill drug-resistant tuberculosis strains

Many tuberculosis infections are due to drug-resistant strains that cannot be treated with antibiotics.
photograph: 123 RF

Dunedin researchers have found a way to kill drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis. The discovery could also help fight other diseases.

Tuberculosis is a deadly disease that infects millions of people each year. Many of these infections are due to drug-resistant strains, forms of the disease that cannot be treated with antibiotics.

Killing about 4,000 people every day, tuberculosis was the world’s deadliest infectious disease until Covid-19 put it aside. It is rare in New Zealand, infecting just 300 people a year, but is disproportionately common in nearby Southeast Asia and remains very difficult to treat.

But a new discovery by University of Otago doctoral candidate Natalie Waller and senior researcher Matthew McNeill could change that. It states that it can prevent other strains from developing resistance in the first place by exploiting the weaknesses of strains that did not exist.

“We made two major discoveries,” he said. “First, we have found a new way to rapidly kill drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis.”

When a pathogen becomes resistant to one antibiotic, it can become vulnerable to another, McNeil said. By identifying its weaknesses, the disease can die out quickly.

“Tuberculosis is a massive public health problem, with about 10 million new cases worldwide each year, about 500,000 due to drug-resistant strains,” he said.

“They are very difficult to treat and have limited treatment options. Those available are often highly toxic and require much longer treatment times.”

McNeil said existing treatments for antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis could take up to two years, but their findings could cut that down to weeks.

“Second [finding] We now have a new way to combine different drugs to prevent drug resistance from actually developing,” he said.

This finding had promising implications for other drug-resistant diseases.

“Drug resistance is a big problem in other infectious diseases,” McNeil said. “[It] They come in many shapes and sizes, but some of the same principles can be applied to other pathogens. In fact, other research groups are actually looking at ways to find the weaknesses inherent in these pathogens. “

Although promising, the idea needs thorough testing before it can be used therapeutically.

“Next is upscaling, to see if these observations made in the lab translate to different animal models,” McNeil said.

“All is well and I hope that in the future there will be clinical trials on this research.”

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