As antibiotic resistance rises, doctors are running out of effective drugs to treat patients who have life-threatening bacterial infections.
Drug development in the antibiotics field is a slow process. Many companies have fled the field in recent years, and as a result, the global pipeline is drying up fast.
But MIT engineers have a new possible way to combat these superbugs: a gene-editing method called CRISPR that can disable any target gene. CRISPR uses a Cas9 protein to guide RNAs into a cell to snip parts of an organism's genome at a specific location.
Timothy Lu, an associate professor of biological engineering and electrical engineering and computer science, wanted to figure out a way to harness bacteria's own weapons to use against them. Lu and his colleagues designed appropriate RNA guide strands to target genes for antibiotic resistance, including an enzyme called NDM-1, which allows bacteria to resist a broad range of beta-lactam antibiotics, including carbapenems.
When Lu and his teamed used the CRISPR system against NDM-1, they were able to precisely kill more than 99% of NDM-1-carrying bacteria, while antibiotics that were resistant to the bacteria were not effective.
In addition, the researchers successfully targeted another antibiotic-resistance gene encoding SHV-18, a mutation in the bacterial chromosome and a virulence factor in a strain of E. coli that causes food-borne illness.
Lu and his team also used the CRISPR system to selectively remove certain types of bacteria from diverse bacterial communities based on their genetic signatures, a technique dubbed "microbiome editing."
The researchers are now testing their approach in mice with hopes that the technology could eventually be used in humans to treat infections or remove other unwanted bacteria in patients.
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