CANCER drugs may serve as an unexpected new weapon against some deadly antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Antibiotic resistance often emerges when bacteria evolve methods of destroying particular drugs or pumping them out of their cells. But some bacteria take a different approach: in response to an antibiotic they hunker down and simply 鈥渟leep鈥� through the onslaught. When the antibiotics are stopped, the dormant bacteria reawaken, which can result in chronic infections.
Previous studies had suggested that such sleeper bacteria over-produce a protein called Hip A. Now of the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, and colleagues have shown that Hip A gives the bacterium Escherichia coli the ability to sleep through an antibiotic attack. They also found that the protein is a kinase, a type of enzyme that modifies the activity of other proteins and can cause cancer in mammals (Science, ).
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Since several cancer drugs work by inhibiting protein kinases, this raises the possibility of using them to treat some forms of antibiotic resistance, something Brennan鈥檚 team plans to look into. They will also investigate whether kinases cause dormancy in other persistent bacteria, such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Pseudomonas aeruginosa.
However, the findings will not help combat hospital superbugs MRSA or Clostridium difficile as their resistance does not come from 鈥渟leeping鈥� through attacks.