SYDNEY, Jan. 24 (Xinhua) -- Australian scientists have discovered a potential new way to defeat the growing legion of "superbugs" that have built up resistance to antibiotics.
The team from Monash University said their findings, published in the latest edition of the Nature Communications journal, are an important contribution to the field of antimicrobial resistance.
Antimicrobial resistance occurs when pathogens such as bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites, mutate over time and no longer respond to medicines, meaning that infections become increasingly difficult to treat.
Biochemist Hsin-Hui Shen from the Monash University Department of Materials Science and Engineering said the team had found that ultrafine particles, known as nanoparticles (NPs), combined with antibiotics, had proven effective in killing superbugs.
Shen said NP-based polytherapy treatments were able to disrupt the outer membrane of superbugs, and so "offer an improved alternative to the conventional use of loading the antibiotic within lipid nanoparticles".
"For a long time nanoparticles have been used specifically as antimicrobial carriers, but the use of them in polytherapy treatments with antibiotics in order to overcome antimicrobial resistance has been overlooked," Shen said, predicting that the combined use of NPs and antibiotics "could reduce the dose intake in the human body and overcome the multidrug resistance".
"Instead of looking for new antibiotics to counteract superbugs, we can use the nanotechnology approach to reduce the dose of antibiotic intake, effectively killing multidrug-resistant organisms," she said.
The need to find viable alternatives to conventional antibiotics has become an ever-more pressing priority for the global medical community.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has reported that no new antibiotics have been discovered in the past 30 years, which means the increasingly overburdened ones now in existence have to combat an ever-growing accumulation of superbugs.
Experts predict that without a breakthrough in the fight, more people will die from basic infections because of new antibiotic-resistant superbugs.
The uncontained rise of the superbugs could also mean common medical procedures such as major surgeries and cancer chemotherapy treatments will become more fraught.
The Monash University team will now progress to the testing phase of their research. ■