The discovery of penicillin dates back to 1928. And since then, antibiotics have contributed to saving millions of lives all over the world, extending the average duration of human life by 23 years. In recent decades, however, this medical and social revolution seems to be entered into crisis: bacteria are learning to circumvent the action of antibiotics, new latitan molecules, and the result is an increasing number of deaths caused by curable microorganisms, against which our medicines have no more effect. It is the current emergency linked to antibiotic resistance, a danger that according to some predictions could kill over 10 million people per year by 2050. And which already sees our country today among the most affected, first among the European nations for the number of new resistant infections recorded every year.
The solution is simple, putting it into practice much less: actions are needed that reduce the diffusion of multiresistent microorganisms, and at hand, there is a need for new antibiotics against which bacteria have not yet developed effective defenses. And it is in this direction that a discovery presented recently on Nature: a molecule with an unknown mechanism of action, and which seems to have excellent chances of becoming, in the future, the first new class of antibiotics to reach the market in over 30 years.
Silent pandemic
As we said, the antimicrobial resistance is now a global health emergency: it causes 10 thousand deaths a year in our country, 33 thousand in Europe, several million worldwide. “We call it a silent pandemic, because it does not receive the attention that we have reserved for an illness like Covid 19, but still has catastrophic consequences all over the world”, confirms Marco Tinelli, infectiousologist and consultant of the Ministry of Health for the national plan to combat the antibiotic-resistance, which we interviewed on the sidelines of the tenth Amit Congress-topics of infectious and tropical diseases-of which is co-president together with Antonella Castagna, primary of infectious diseases of San Raffaele in Milan. “In Italy we serve the errors of the past, when for decades we have abused antibiotics in an extreme way, thus fueling the onset of multi-resistant strains that made us one of the European countries with the greatest number of cases and deaths. The institutional response, however, has been there, with the national plan to combat the antibiotic-resistance that is receiving its third update for 2026, of which the positive results are started.
The approach that is used to prevent and reduce the diffusion of the superbatters is that of ‘One Health’, which is recognizing the indissoluble relationship between human, animal and the environment. We therefore aim to reduce the unsuitable consumption of antibiotics in the population and in hospitals; To decrease its veterinary use, to prevent the farms from turning into superbatter tanks; and the monitoring of waste water, which can function by sites of spreading resistance mechanisms.
“Next to the prevention and mitigation strategies, it is also important to have a therapeutic paraphernalia to be used available when multiresistent infections emerge – Stores Tinelli – The one with bacteria is a continuous run -up, the more you use a molecule, the more likely it is that a resistant strain emerges. For this reason we have new generation drugs called ‘Reserve’, which are prescribed with a lot of caution only by specialists and only by specialists and only When their usefulness is certain.
An unexpected discovery
It is precisely this need for new antibiotic molecules that the research just published in Nature is encountered. The molecule in question is called lariocidine, and is a so -called peptide lasso, capable of interacting with the bacterial ribosomes, the staff in which proteins are synthesized, preventing their functioning. It is harmless to the cells of our body, and – really interesting detail – it seems effective also against bacterial strains that have developed resistance to many antibiotics.
The authors of the study identified it practically by chance, in a bacterium of the Paenibacillus species, isolated by a ground sample taken from the garden of one of the laboratory technicians where the discovery was carried out. Lariocidine has been tested in vitro against a multitude of bacteria, confirming that its mechanism of action, different from that of all the other antibiotics currently in use, is also effective on bacteria traditionally resistant to drugs.
The new antibiotic that can defeat super bacteria and save millions of people
It was therefore also experimented in an animal model: mice with an infection caused by Acinetobacter Baumannii C0286, a strain of carbapenemi resistant bacteria, a broad spectrum antibiotics usually reserved as a last resource, when all therapies are ineffective. In the absence of treatment, mice do not survive more than 28 hours when they are infected with these bacteria. Those treated with lariocidine were still alive over 48 hours after the infection, and had an important reduction in the levels of bacteria present in their blood.
For now, in short, lariocidine has all the credentials. To see it arrive on the market, however, it will still be used several years: the molecule will be changed to enhance its action and reduce the risk of side effects, it will be necessary to develop a production method that allows its industrial manufacture, and its effectiveness will be confirmed with long, and expensive, clinical experiments. Even so, the discovery of a promising new antibiotics class is extremely important: in fact, it has been 30 years that you have not identified one that can arrive on the market, since the end of the 80s, more precisely, when cyclic lipopepts such as daptomycin were discovered.