SCIENTISTS HAVE DEVELOPED A FUNDAMENTALLY NEW ANTIBIOTIC AGAINST TUBERCULOSIS

The Scientist, Alfredo Angeles-Boza, his graduate student Daben Libardo and their colleagues from the Indian Institute of Science, the Max Planck Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have decided to create an antibiotic that will be able to get inside the cells and destroy tuberculosis bacteria. The disease-causing bacteria, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, hide from antibiotics inside resistant cells and are susceptible to drugs for a short period of time. Then the bacteria leave a cell and look for and attack the next one. As a result, infected people must take medications for a long time - until the infection is completely eliminated. Human cells infected with Mycobacteria use copper to fight bacteria, but they do it in an easier way. They trap bacteria and inject copper ions +1. The scientists took advantage of this. However, Mycobacteria can overcome such attack. The bacterium absorbs one electron from copper and the charge; as a result it becomes +2. Due to this, the copper ions +1 become harmless to bacteria. If a sufficiently large number of such ions are concentrated around them, copper, which is more dangerous for microorganisms, simply cannot "push through" to the target of the attack.

SOURCE: RBK-UKRAINE