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These bacteria cause meningitis, gonorrhea, whooping cough and otitis in humans.
A recent international study, directed by Jesús Arenas, a researcher at the University of Zaragoza, opens a door to hope in the face of the problem of antibiotic resistance, which represent one of the three greatest health threats facing humanity in the coming decades.
The research, which has been published in the prestigious scientific journal Virulence, has allowed the discovery of a new defense system against biofilms, that is, the associations of pathogenic bacteria that adhere to tissues and create tolerance to antibiotics, and are the cause of meningitis, gonorrhea, whooping cough or otitis in humans.
At work six other researchers have participated from different institutions such as Utrecht University, Utrecht Hospital, the University of Oslo and the Dutch company U-Protein Express BV.
During the last decades There has been a significant increase in the number of clinical cases attributed to multi-resistant bacteria to antibiotics in hospitals. Particularly problematic in this regard are major human pathogens, for example, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, among others.
Another example is Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which moves widely in the community and rapidly acquires resistance to antibiotics. It is estimated that multiresistant bacteria They cause around 700.000 human deaths each year worldwide, and this number is expected to exceed 10 million deaths in 2050.
In 2018, the WHO Global Antimicrobial Surveillance System reported a widespread occurrence of multi-resistant bacteria in 2.164.568 people with suspected bacterial infections in 66 countries.
Despite being a global problem, the development of new antibiotics lacks economic attractiveness for the pharmaceutical industry due to its high cost and the inevitable emergence of antimicrobial resistance.
The discovery was the result of a chance observation in 2015, While Arenas was studying the behavior of meningococcus, causal agent of meningitis, in cell lines at the University of Utrecht (Holland). Since serum is required for the cultivation of these lines, Arenas observed that when the bacteria grew in its presence, although they survived, they were not capable of forming biofilms.
Source: Heraldo de Aragón
