Illustration of MRSA bacterium
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Antibody therapy may treat infections caused by dangerous strains of bacteria that most antibiotics cannot kill. This treatment has not yet been tested in humans, but it works in mice.
methicillin resistance Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is one of the deadliest bacteria. More than 100,000 people died worldwide in 2019 and have evolved to avoid all but seven antibiotics.
“One of the challenges of treatment. [MRSA] The organism is very good at evading various immune responses,” says Victor Torres of NYU Langone Health in New York. This involves the deployment of proteins known as antibodies into the body that identify and attack pathogens.
Torres and his team developed a therapy by introducing genetic mutations into human antibodies that attack MRSA. They designed a small protein called sentinin on the surface of the molecule. These prevent bacteria from piercing immune cells. Engineered antibodies target 10 disease-causing mechanisms of MRSA.
To test its efficacy, researchers injected the antibody into 20 mice 4 hours after being infected with MRSA. Half of the mice were injected with the new antibody treatment, and the other half received an antibody that had no effect on the bacteria.
After 3 days, skin lesions in mice treated with engineered antibodies were on average 95% smaller than those seen in the control group. An average of 98% less indicated that this treatment could eliminate MRSA infections that progressed to other organ systems.
In another experiment, the team found that antibody treatment increased the effectiveness of vancomycin, one of the so-called ‘last resort’ antibiotics, in 54 mice with kidney infections caused by MRSA. Mice receiving the combination therapy had 99% fewer bacteria in their kidney tissue than mice treated with vancomycin alone.
“What if [this] Jim Cassatt of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Tennessee said: It’s to provide a new blueprint for designing antibody therapies, he says.
number of [effective] Antibiotics are shrinking, shrinking, shrinking,” says Torres. “The significance of this research is therefore to provide new options, or at least new pathways, that could yield new treatments to prevent death and infection.”
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