THE agonising gut cramps, bloody diarrhoea and life-threatening kidney damage
that sometimes result from Escherichia coli O157 infections might soon
be preventable. A biotech company in Canada has developed the first drug to
treat the condition.
The company says that the drug could have been made available on
鈥渃ompassionate grounds鈥� to help treat the victims of Britain鈥檚 latest outbreak
in Cockermouth, Cumbria, had it been notified earlier. Twenty-two people, half
of them children, ended up in hospital after drinking contaminated milk.
鈥淚t鈥檚 a wonderful drug for this terrible, terrible condition,鈥� says Howard
Trachtman of the Schneider Children鈥檚 Hospital in New York, who is in charge of
a multi-centre trial of the drug in the US and Canada. 鈥淭he beneficiaries would
be patients like those kids.鈥� Trachtman says that in trials the drug has reduced
by half the risk of patients going on to develop haemolytic uremic syndrome
(HUS), the stage of disease in which the kidney is damaged.
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The drug, which was developed by Synsorb Biotech of Calgary, consists of an
inert sphere of silicon dioxide from which multiple copies of a trisaccharide
sugar molecule protrude. These mimic the receptors on gut cells to which the
bacterium鈥檚 deadly 鈥渟higa鈥� toxin binds. When patients swallow the drug, it
reaches the gut undigested and mops up the toxin.
Intensive trials are under way at hospitals throughout the US and Canada. The
results of earlier trials in Japan and Argentina have been encouraging, although
Japanese recipients received antibiotics as well. Even so, only 1 per cent of
patients receiving the combination developed HUS compared with a usual rate of
15 per cent for antibiotics alone.