New Miscellany: new antibiotics from frogs (General)

by David Turell , Tuesday, March 25, 2025, 19:15 (9 days ago) @ David Turell

Fighting bacteria is part of nature:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/03/250325114917.htm

"Frogs have thrived for hundreds of millions of years, spreading across virtually every corner of the earth, from tropical jungles to subarctic forests. Throughout their evolution, they have developed remarkable defenses -- including previously unreported antibiotics -- against the hordes of bacteria that thrive in their moist environments. Variants of these compounds may one day protect humans from drug-resistant pathogens.

"... describes the creation of synthetic peptides, a class of antibiotics, derived from the secretions of a frog commonly found in South Asia.

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"In the new paper, de la Fuente and his co-authors demonstrate how "structure-guided design," a process involving minute changes to the peptide's chemical structure, yields multiple antibiotic candidates without the drawbacks of the unmodified peptide.

"'With structure-guided design, we change the sequence of the molecule," says Marcelo Torres, a research associate in the de la Fuente lab and co-author of the paper, "and then we see how those mutations affect the function that we are trying to improve."

***

"...the researchers then tested the resulting synthetic peptides against a range of bacteria. In preclinical models, the team found that the new compounds were as effective as last-resort antibiotics like polymyxin B in targeting harmful bacteria, without affecting human cells or beneficial gut bacteria.

"The researchers developed and tested their peptides not only in single cultures but also in more complex bacterial communities, which allowed them to measure the effects in a more realistic microbial setting. "Those experiments are very difficult to set up because you need to grow different bacteria at once," says de la Fuente. "We had to come up with the specific ratio of each bacterium to have a sustained community."

"If additional preclinical testing goes well, the researchers will submit the peptides for what are known as Investigational New Drug (IND) enabling studies, the last step prior to applying for approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, at which point the drugs could be clinically tested."

Comment: new potent antibiotics are desperately needed. That antibiotics are processed by all animals is obvious. It is part of the dog-eat-dog world.