Medical News Today has findings that make it that much easier to fight bacterial infections without throwing your whole body out of whack – by using lolamicin, a “smart antibiotic” that kills the bad germs while sparing the gut biome that controls digestion, mood, and a bunch of other stuff:
Researchers identified the antibiotic lolamicin, which disrupts a particular system called the Lol lipoprotein transport system.
Next, they evaluated how well lolamicin worked against the multi-drug-resistant clinical isolates. They found that “Lolamicin has activity against a panel of more than 130 multidrug-resistant clinical isolates,” so the drug showed great promise as an effective antibiotic.
Researchers then tested lolamicin in mice. Overall, mice tolerated doses of the drug well. To test the efficacy of lolamicin, researchers infected mice with acute pneumonia and septicemia (blood poisoning) and found the drug effective at treating the infections.
When given orally, 70% of the mice with a septic infection lived. The septicemia models were used to test overall survival.
Next, researchers examined mouse stool samples to determine how much lolamicin affected the gut microbiome compared to broad-spectrum and gram-positive-only antibiotics. Lolamicin outperformed these antibiotics in leaving the microbiome alone.
Mice treated with lolamicin were also much less likely to experience C. difficile infections than those treated with other antibiotic types after exposure to C.difficle.
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Don’t give up the kimchi, bran, and yogurt just yet … they’re yet to try this on humans. You can read more of the microbiome-sparing antibiotic research here, in Nature.