AN INTERNATIONAL collaboration led by Sydney University Professors Richard Payne, from the School of Chemistry, and Warwick Britton, from the Sydney Medical School and the Centenary Institute, has discovered a new compound which could translate into a new drug lead for tuberculosis (TB).
Its findings were published in Nature Communications last week.
Believed by many to be a relic of past centuries, TB causes more deaths than any other infectious disease including HIV/AIDs, the authors write.
In 2015 there were an estimated 10.4 million new cases of TB and 1.4 million deaths from the disease.
The bacterium causing TB (mycobacterium tuberculosis) is becoming increasingly resistant to current therapies, the group argues, highlighting the urgent need to develop new TB drugs.
In 2015 an estimated 480,000 cases were unresponsive to the two major drugs used to treat TB with an estimated 250,000 TB deaths caused by drug-resistant infections.
The research investigated soil bacteria compounds known to effectively prevent other bacteria growing around them.
Using synthetic chemistry, the researchers were able to recreate these compounds with structural variations, turning them into more potent compounds called analogues which, when tested in a containment laboratory, proved to be effective killers of mycobacterium tuberculosis.
"The analogues also effectively killed TB-causing bacteria inside macrophages, the cells in which the bacteria live in human lungs," said Payne, adding that planning for further testing and safety studies was underway.
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