Via The Guardian: New class of antibiotic raises hopes for urgently-needed gonorrhoea drug. Excerpt:
A new class of antibiotic has been found to work in the lab against the sexually transmitted infection gonorrhoea, which can cause infertility and damage to babies and is fast becoming resistant to all existing drugs.
Although it is early days, because the antibiotic has yet to be tried in animals or humans, researchers say they are excited by its potential. The World Health Organisation has listed gonorrhoea as a high priority infection that poses a great threat to human health, estimating that there about about 78m gonorrhoea infections worldwide each year. In the UK, gonorrhoea is the second most common bacterial STI after chlamydia, with 35,000 cases in England in 2014 alone. New drugs are urgently needed.
Closthioamide, which was discovered in 2010, has been tested in the lab against samples of the Neisseria gonorrhoeae bacterium causing the disease by researchers from Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).
They tested 149 samples of bacteria from hospital patients with infections in the throat, urethra, cervix and rectum. Very small amounts of the antibiotic were effective against 146 of the 149 samples. The drug was also effective against samples of the drug-resistant bacteria provided to the researchers by the World Health Organisation. Their results are published in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.
