Antibiotic-resistant bacteria can be killed by pom-pom molecules
Pom-pom-shaped molecules rip apart MRSA and other drug-resistant bacteria in minutes, are cheap and easy to make, and don’t seem to lead to bacterial resistance
Life
27 June 2022
There is a new way to kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock
Dangerous bacteria that have become resistant to conventional antibiotics can now be killed in minutes using pom-pom-shaped molecules that rip apart their walls.
The new molecules are cheap and easy to make and bacteria don’t appear to become resistant to them, even over hundreds of generations. “We’re getting a lot of interest from pharmaceutical companies about developing them further,” says Neil O’Brien-Simpson at the University of Melbourne in Australia, who is part of the team that invented them.
Antibiotics used …