New antibiotics may come from your nose

Scientists at the University of Tubingen in Germany have published a paper declaring that they've discovered a new class of antibiotics, and the source is the bacteria inside people's noses.

Most antibiotics are developed from defense mechanisms that other organisms deploy against bacterial infections. For instance, penicillin, the first antibiotic, is produced by a fungus. Many other antibiotics can be derived by slightly altering the molecular structure of these natural antibiotics. Ampicillin, one of the more common examples, is a derivative of penicillin.

However, discovering new antibiotics is hard, and the most recent class of antibiotics dates back 30 years. Because bacteria naturally develop resistances to antibiotics over time, many scientists are worried about so-called "superbugs" that are immune to most or all antibiotics. For the past several years, multiple different groups of researchers have been in a race against time to develop new classes of antibiotics that could counter the rising threat of superbugs. The University of Tubingen group may have produced the most promising results yet, developing a brand-new antibiotic, called lugdunin, from bacteria living in people's noses.

One of the more common bacterial invaders is called Staphylococcus aureus, and it lives in the noses of about 30 percent of the human population. The researchers examined the noses of people who didn't have this bacteria, and they found a rival species, Staphylococcus lugdunensis, had taken its place. Experimenting with S. lugdunensis in the lab, the researchers identified a single gene that was responsible for producing a new antibiotic, which they called lugdunin.

Tests performed on mice showed lugdunin could treat bacterial infections on the skin even when those bacteria were superbugs. Many of the mice treated with lugdunin showed not a single superbug cell remaining.

There are still a number of hurdles that lugdunin has to clear before it's approved for human use, so it may be several years before your doctor can prescribe it to treat your infection. However, the researchers believe they've only scratched the surface and that there are many more future antibiotics hiding out in the human body. There are over a thousand species of bacteria that naturally live inside us, and any one of them could hold the key to future medical breakthroughs.

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