Are antivitamins the new antibiotics?
Antibiotics are among the most important discoveries of modern medicine and have saved millions of lives since the discovery of penicillin almost 100 years ago. Many diseases caused by bacterial infections—such as pneumonia, meningitis or septicemia—are successfully treated with antibiotics. However, bacteria can develop resistance to antibiotics which then leaves doctors struggling to find effective treatments. Particularly problematic are pathogens which develop multi-drug resistance and are unaffected by most antibiotics. This leads to severe disease progression in affected patients, often with a fatal outcome. Scientists all over the world are therefore engaged in the search for new antibiotics. Researchers at the University of Göttingen and the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry Göttingen have now described a promising new approach involving 'antivitamins' to develop new classes of antibiotics. The results were published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.