Simon Santow reported this story on Thursday, February 5, 2015 08:26:16

MICHAEL BRISSENDEN: Australian researchers say they may have made a major step towards the development of a much needed new class of antibiotics.



Drug resistant bacteria such as golden staph represent something of a medical nightmare for patients and clinicians alike.



Let loose in a hospital, golden staph can attack intravenous lines, catheters and wounds after operations.



And to make matters worse, regular antibiotics can be powerless in the battle to help patients stave off an attack.



Dr Ramiz Boulos from Flinders University in Adelaide is at the forefront of the discovery of new drugs that have been shown to kill off golden staph in worms.



He's speaking here to AM's Simon Santow.



RAMIZ BOULOS: These compounds have not been discovered before. Some of the actual molecules are new in the chemistry world itself.



Certainly their use against bacteria is novel (inaudible) so bacteria has never been exposed to similar molecules. The fact that we are targeting a protein that is very vital for the survival of bacteria means that resistance emergence is going to be a much slower process.



SIMON SANTOW: What were you able to prove in terms of the Holy Grail for a lot of people and a lot of scientists, and that is trying to tackle some of these drug-resistant microbes like golden staph?



RAMIZ BOULOS: In a way this is, this has been an exciting discovery but there was also a luck factor involved. What I initially did was design a number of molecules that were then tested with the protein for a particular molecule that showed really good binding and that was further modified and used in the computer modelling - so it was an integrative process, if you like, that eventually gave us- gave rise to this new class of antibiotics.



SIMON SANTOW: And the aim is to be able to kill the drug-resistant golden staph which runs amok in some of our hospitals?



RAMIZ BOULOS: Yes. So golden staph obviously there is a huge problem not only in the less developed world but also in the more developed world, and they seem to emerge in hospitals or where they use often and more frequently use antibiotics.



So these selective pressures of the presence of antibiotics in their environment exacerbate their resistant evolution mechanisms, if you like.



SIMON SANTOW: So you tested it out on worms and what did you find?



RAMIZ BOULOS: We did indeed find out that the antibiotics cured an MRSA (methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus) infection in the worm. And although the worm looks very different to your average human, there is significant similarity in terms of the genome of the two organisms that they are often looked upon as a good model for studying infection.



And the fact that we did see therapeutic and very positive effect in the worm model gives us a lot of confidence that moving forward we would be able to translate this to humans.



MICHAEL BRISSENDEN: And that's research scientist Dr Ramiz Boulos, speaking to AM's Simon Santow. And the work has been published overnight in the Journal of Antibiotics.