New Antibiotic Lolamicin Shows Promise in Protecting Gut Health While Fighting Infections

Safe and careful antibiotic use is a public health concern. One concern is how antibiotics affect helpful bacteria in the gut. Thus, researchers are interested in protecting gut bacteria while allowing medications to fight infections properly.A recent study published in Nature examined the effectiveness of a new antibiotic, lolamicin. This antibiotic is gram-negative specific. Hey also found in their mice tests that lolamicin effectively treated infection while protecting the gut microbiome. Future research in this area could lead to doctors having the option to treat infections while protecting helpful bacteria from harm. 

Researchers identified the antibiotic lolamicin, which disrupts a particular system called the Lol lipoprotein transport system. Next, they evaluated how well lolamicin worked against the multi-drug-resistant clinical isolates. They found that Lolamicin has activity against a panel of more than 130 multidrug-resistant clinical isolates, so the drug showed great promise as an effective antibiotic. 

Researchers then tested lolamicin in mice. Overall, mice tolerated doses of the drug well. To test the efficacy of lolamicin, researchers infected mice with acute pneumonia and septicemia (blood poisoning) and found the drug effective at treating the infections. 

When given orally, 70% of the mice with a septic infection lived. The septicemia models were used to test overall survival. 

Next, researchers examined mouse stool samples to determine how much lolamicin affected the gut microbiome compared to broad-spectrum and gram-positive-only antibiotics. Lolamicin outperformed these antibiotics in leaving the microbiome alone. Certain types of antibiotics are effective against certain types of bacteria. Doctors should carefully prescribe the appropriate type of antibiotic to ensure infections are treated properly.Gram-negative bacteria are a particular group of bacteria that is resistant to antibiotics. When antimicrobial resistance develops, recovery for people with these infections can become more difficult. 

Another concern is that antibiotics harm the helpful bacteria and organisms in the human gut. Antibiotics can affect the diversity of the gut microbiota. Clostridioides difficile is one bacterium that can cause severe infection after antibiotics have disrupted the microbiome. 

Despite the promising implications of this new antibiotic, the research has certain limitations. This study focused on using mouse models so future research could explore lolamicin’s effectiveness in people.More research is definitely required to extend our findings on lolamicin. For starters, researchers say that they want to continue testing lolamicin against a wider panel of bacterial strains. 

They would also need to determine how quickly drug resistance is induced, which is an issue encountered across all antibiotic development. Further, while they have shown efficacy across various mouse models, there is still some work to do before this reaches development for human use. More detailed toxicology assessments and pharmacokinetic studies to fully appreciate lolamicin’s potential also needs to be performed.