Staphylococcus
aureus Credit: iStock ©iLexx
(January 23, 2016) A
team of biologists and biomedical researchers at UC San Diego has developed a
new method to determine if bacteria are susceptible to antibiotics within a few
hours, an advance that could slow the appearance of drug resistance and allow
doctors to more rapidly identify the appropriate treatment for patients with
life threatening bacterial infections.
In a paper published online this week in the journal
EBioMedicine, the scientists reported the development of a rapid susceptibility
test for Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium that causes some 60 percent of
hospital-acquired infections and which has spread in communities, causing
pneumonia and a variety of skin and tissue infections in both healthy and
immune-compromised individuals.
The development is important, say biomedical scientists,
because of the critical need for physicians to rapidly discriminate between
drug resistant strains (commonly termed MRSA for methicillin-resistant S.
aureus) and drug sensitive strains, since these infections can progress
rapidly, especially MRSA strains with additional resistance to newer
antibiotics designed to treat pathogens that are now appearing in hospitals.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
antibiotic resistance causes two million illnesses and 23,000 deaths annually,
costing the U.S. economy approximately $20-billion a year in direct health care
costs and nearly eight million extra days in the hospital. Indeed, bacteria are
evolving resistance to antibiotics much more quickly than global biomedical
research efforts are delivering new drugs to market, leading to the appearance
of infections caused by bacteria that are now resistant to every therapy.