HOUSTON: Molecular drills have gained the ability to target and destroy deadly bacteria that have evolved resistance to nearly all antibiotics. In some cases, the drills make the antibiotics effective once again.
Researchers at Rice University, Texas A&M University, Biola University and Durham (U.K.) University showed that motorized molecules developed in the Rice lab of chemist James Tour are effective at killing antibiotic-resistant microbes within minutes.
“These superbugs could kill 10 million people a year by 2050, way overtaking cancer,” Tour said. “These are nightmare bacteria; they don’t respond to anything.”
The motors target the bacteria and, once activated with light, burrow through their exteriors.
While bacteria can evolve to resist antibiotics by locking the antibiotics out, the bacteria have no defence against molecular drills. Antibiotics able to get through openings made by the drills are once again lethal to the bacteria.
The researchers reported their results in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano.
Tour and Robert Pal, a Royal Society University Research Fellow at Durham and co-author of the new paper, introduced the molecular drills for boring through cells in 2017. The drills are paddlelike molecules that can be prompted to spin at 3 million rotations per second when activated with light.
The research was supported by the Discovery Institute, the Welch Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the U.K.’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the Royal Society University Research Fellowship.
