teixobactin

Even if Teixobactin is the solution it won't get through all testing and regulatory steps for many years.

Without having read the article too closely, teixobactin appears to be binding the lipids of the bacterial cell wall.

Lewis estimated that it may take more than 30 years for bacteria to become resistant to teixobactin.

The 30 years guess is based on the history of vancomycin, which like teixobactin was isolated from a soil bacteria.

However, that does not exclude the possibility of the bacterium acquiring a plasmid or phage carrying an enzyme that inactives teixobactin.

For teixobactin, there were no mutants with an MIC greater than the parent S.

As if you didn't read about Teixobactin in pop science journalism.

Serial passage of S.aureus in the presence of sub-MIC levels of teixobactin over a period of 27 days failed to produce resistant mutants as well (Fig.

The state of the art has likely improved, and these guys used novel microbiological methods to find the bacteria that produce teixobactin in the first place.

From the Nature article, the claim that resistance to teixobactin is hard is based on an attempt by the authors to induce resistance by culturing S.

So this survival mechanism is one of just not letting the antibiotic inside in the first place, which is how it appears teixobactin producing bacteria survive it.

Cultures from the second highest concentrations that allowed growth (OD600≥2) were diluted 1:100 into fresh media containing 0.25xMIC, 0.5xMIC,1xMIC,2xMIC and 4xMIC of teixobactin.

"Researchers haven’t identified a new class of antibiotic medication since 1987." Teixobactin is 2015 and is probably a member of a new class of antibiotics.

According to the paper "Teixobactin inhibits cell wall synthesis " Its no more possible that a cell could become resistant, than you or I could become resistant to having our head blown off.

I found a story in Financial Times [2] reporting, "Teixobactin quickly kills Gram-positive bacteria, which are prominent in discussions of antibiotic resistance, including Clostridium difficile, Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Staphylococcus aureus.

That's probably a safety mechanism built-in by the gram-negative bacteria that created Teixobactin in the first place." That expert also comments that he would strictly limit application of this antibiotic at first to hospital settings, and that would be my policy recommendation too, to reduce the chance of producing selection pressure for resistant strains of bacteria.

Teixobactin is not yet on the market or approved for use in humans.

Its incredible that so far there's no evidence of resistance development with Teixobactin.

Teixobactin is cool, but if it's only active against gram positives, it's never going to work against most of the bacteria listed in the article: E.