TB Drug Could Be Answer To Antibiotic Development In Age Of Drug Resistance

University of Illinois researchers have studied the SQ109 tuberculosis drug and determined that it could also be the basis for a class of broad-spectrum drugs that can fight a variety of bacteria, fungal infections, and parasites, and evade resistance. SQ109 is manufactured by Sequella.

Researchers also believe that the SQ109 drug could avoid resistance. The research team, led by University of Illinois chemistry professor Eric Oldfield, started studying the ways that the SQ109 drug affected the tuberculosis bacterium. They then looked at the potential ways the drug could be altered to target other pathogens, such as yeast and malaria. The researchers believe that by targeting multiple pathways, the chance that pathogens will become resistant to the drug lessens significantly.

Oldfield spoke on how the drug could evade resistance. “Drug resistance is a major public health threat,” said Oldfield. “We have to make new antibiotics, and we have to find ways to get around the resistance problem. And one way to do that is with multitarget drugs. Resistance in many cases arises because there’s a specific mutation in the target protein so the drug will no longer bind. Thus, one possible route to attacking the drug resistance problem will be to devise drugs that don’t have just one target, but two or three targets.”

“I was reading Science magazine one day and saw this molecule, SQ109, and I thought, that looks a bit like molecules we’ve been studying that have multiple targets,” Oldfield said. “Given its chemical structure, we thought that some of the enzymes that we study as cancer and antiparasitic drug targets also could be SQ109 targets. We hoped that we could make some analogs that would be more potent against tuberculosis, and maybe even against parasites.”