A new class of antibiotic drugs are showing great promise, and their origins are well, not as 'clean' as you may think – soil.
Yes, you read that correctly, National Institutes of Health-funded researchers are digging in the dirt to find new clues in their fight against antibiotic resistance.
In a post on the NIH's Directors Blog, Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health, explained that, "soil from a grassy field in Maine—yielded the biological lead that enabled a team led by NIH-supported researchers at Boston’s Northeastern University to develop teixobactin."
Teixobactin, "not only has the ability to kill a wide range of infection-causing bacteria, but to kill them in a way that may greatly reduce the problem of resistance."
But, it's not just that one development researchers are finding, there multiple new possibilities.
"All told, the researchers isolated more than 25 potential new drug compounds, including a number of possible antibiotics, an anti-cancer agent, and a compound that specifically targets the bacteria that causes tuberculosis," Collins wrote.
