New anti-tuberculosis drug shows promise in fighting drug-resistant bacteria

In the era of antibiotic resistance, a new study has found a promising compound that may work against the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, including its drug-resistant strains.

This new compound has shown promising results against Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium responsible for tuberculosis and the world's leading cause of death from bacterial diseases.

The study was conducted in collaboration with researchers from the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, China, and McGill University, Canada.

The researchers, who published their findings in the journal Microbiology Spectrum, said that this discovery provides hope for the development of more effective anti-tuberculosis drugs as current tuberculosis treatments are outdated, require long periods of treatment and with the growing problem of antibiotic resistance are faced.

In the search for new effective antibiotics against tuberculosis, the research team examined natural compounds known for their antimicrobial properties.

One of these compounds, sanguinarine, is derived from a flowering plant native to North America.

Although sanguinarine is used in alternative medicine, it is not suitable for treating humans due to its toxicity.

To overcome this limitation, scientists modified sanguinarine using medicinal chemical techniques, resulting in a safer and more effective compound called BPD-9.

In laboratory and animal studies, BPD-9 successfully killed strains of M. tuberculosis that are resistant to standard antibiotics.

Additionally, the compound was effective against dormant and intracellular tuberculosis bacteria, two major challenges in current tuberculosis therapies.

BPD-9 also demonstrated specificity, targeting only harmful bacteria in the same genus such as M. tuberculosis, potentially sparing the body's beneficial bacteria that are often affected by conventional antibiotics.

“Our discovery that the new compound is effective against other members of the Mycobacterium genus could also prove valuable in the fight against fatal lung infections caused by non-tuberculous mycobacteria, which are known to be resistant to most antibiotics,” said Dr. Jim Sun, a microbiology professor at the University of British Columbia and lead author of the study.

Researchers suspected that BPD-9 might kill Mycobacterium tuberculosis in a different way than existing anti-TB drugs.