Natural Products Chemistry Holds the Answer to the Looming Antibiotic Crisis

This article was about how drugs of the future might actually come from botanical treatments dismissed by Western medicine. Dr. Quave, an ethnobotanist from Emory University is using her efforts to find plants with the power to heal and prevent a medical apocalypse. She is a leader in the field of ethnobotany and gathers hundreds of therapeutic plants and performs a chemical analysis on them back at Emory University. She also has spent time reading about medicinal plants used by the Native Americans and has conducted fieldwork regarding medicinal plants in Peru, rural Italy, Sicily, Albania, and Kosovo.                                                                                                                                

This is important because the widespread emergence of resistant bacteria have claimed around 700,000 lives a year globally. Experts predict that by the year 2050, they will kill 10 million people annually, which is one person every three seconds. Simon Gibbons, a medicinal phytochemist from University College London states "Nature is a superchemist" and "The kind of evolution that happens in living things gives rise to unusual chemistry that is not straightforward to synthesize."This is because organic chemists have been unable to emulate the ingenuity and complexity of organic compounds produced from eons of evolution. Cedric Pearce, the chief executive of the fungi-based drug development company Mycosynthetix states "Nature creates extremely effective but extraordinarily complex structures that a chemist would look at and say now why would I ever think to design that?"  

The world's cabinet of useful antibiotics is almost empty and scientists are rushing to discover new antibiotics by searching natural resources.Some researchers are trying to mine the untapped potential of soil bacteria, devising new kinds of growth chambers that might allow unstudied species to thrive in the lab. Others are genetically engineering microbes to produce little-known compounds that could be useful for making drugs. Still others are scavenging the native antibiotics in ocean life, fungi and insects. As of 2003, at least 25% of all medicine was derived from plants; but only a fraction of the 50,000 known medicinal plants used globally have been studied in the lab.

It was in southern Italy where Dr. Quave discovered that they use Elmleaf Blackberry to treat boils and abscesses. She took samples of the blackberries back to her lab at Emory University where they were dried, grinded to a powder, and extracted with various organic solvents. Then, different combinations of the blackberry powder was added to brothy wells of MRSA. The powder did not kill the MRSA, but prevented it from forming biofilms, which allows MRSA to adhere to living tissues and medical devices. The powder sidestepped the bacteria's resistance by interrupting its ability to communicate to other bacteria, or Quorum Sensing. It is when bacteria communicate and team up when they start spewing toxins and exchange genes for antibiotic resistance. They then form a thick cellular wall that is impenetrable to many drugs. A drug that could disrupt a bacteria's quorum sensing can sidestep resistance and there would be weaker evolutionary pressure to develop resistance in the first place.

Dr. Quave's samples being freeze-dried by a lyophilizer

   

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