Conversation

A new antibiotic, called #lolamicin, can hone in on gram-negative pathogens while leaving other microbes alone.

There's still a long road ahead before the drug can be tested on humans, but researchers are hopeful it can serve as a blueprint for future antibiotic development.

Gram-negative bacteria are common causes of infections in the bowels, lungs, bladder, and blood,
and they are notoriously difficult to kill.
Their resistance to current antibiotics is one of the most urgent threats facing global human health today.

Broad-spectrum antibiotics can kill both gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria. But scientists say there is a critical need to find medicine that can target gram-negative bacteria specifically, as they're more likely to be resistant to our current antibiotics.
This gives more microbes that are useful to human health a chance of being spared.

A drug like lolamicin could be just the ticket. In laboratory dishes, when lolamicin was pitted against 130 drug-resistant strains of common gram-negative bacteria, like E. coli, K. pneumoniae, and E. cloacae, the medicine killed every single one, succeeding where many other antibiotics failed.
In living rodents, lolamicin also successfully treated acute pneumonia and blood infections, all while sparing the gut microbiome.
In fact, scientists found the medicine had"no effect on gram-positive bacteria or on non-pathogenic gram-negative commensal bacteria" that were living in the mice.

https://www.sciencealert.com/game-changing-antibiotic-discovered-that-spares-good-bacteria