Word: myxopyronin
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Armed with a new biochemical understanding of how myxopyronin functions, along with detailed models of its behavior inside bacterial cells, researchers say drug development is feasible at last. Ebright says the drug could be in clinical human trials within five years. "What has not been possible previously was design of new derivatives ," says Ebright. "It's now possible to make new derivatives that are expressly designed to...have higher potency...
Publishing in the Oct. 17 issue of the journal Cell, scientists at Rutgers University describe a group of antibiotic compounds, first isolated decades ago from naturally occurring antibacterial substances in soil. Among them, researchers say, is a compound called myxopyronin that shows great promise. It has been synthesized in the lab and shown to be safe in animal trials, and although the drug hasn't been tested in humans yet, cell-based experiments suggest that it is potent enough to kill a wide range of stubborn bugs, including drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis and the deadly type of staph known...
Ebright hopes myxopyronin will be especially useful in the battle against drug-resistant tuberculosis, a disease for which clinicians have never had a perfect therapy. The success of TB treatment depends on the destruction of active and dormant bacteria to prevent relapse - something that few existing antibiotics have been able to do. One way to kill a dormant cell is to target biochemical processes that continue even in latency - there aren't many of those. But myxopyronin works by interfering with the enzyme RNA polymerase, which controls gene transcription in cells and is necessary for cell survival, dormant...
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