An arsenic-based antibiotic identified by FIU working with an international team could be the answer to combating pneumonia, MRSA and E. coli strains that no longer respond to existing drugs. A patented lab-made version could bring it to the masses – and may even stem the spread of malaria.
Antibiotic resistance has been called one of the biggest public health threats of our time. There is a pressing need for new and novel antibiotics to combat the rise in antibiotic-resistant bacteria worldwide.
FIU scientists have moved a step closer to producing drugs that could solve this urgent global health problem.
Researchers at the Herbert Wertheim College are part of an international team that discovered a new broad-spectrum antibiotic that contains arsenic. The findings came out of a collaboration with the Institute for Agro-Environmental Sciences, NARO in Japan.
The antibiotic arsinothricin, or AST, naturally occurs in soil. It is effective against many types of bacteria, explains Barry Rosen, distinguished university professor in cellular and molecular medicine and co-senior author of the study published in the Nature Journal Communications Biology. “Arsinothricin is the first and only known natural arsenic-containing antibiotic,” he says, “and we have great hopes for it.”
“People get scared when they hear the word arsenic because it can be a toxin and carcinogen, but the use of so-called arsenicals as antimicrobials and anti-cancer agents is well established,” Rosen says. In 1908, Paul Erlich won the Nobel Prize in medicine after finding an arsenic-based cure for syphilis. Arsenicals are used to treat tropical diseases, prevent infectious diseases in poultry and as a chemotherapeutic treatment for leukemia.
The multidisciplinary FIU team has since earned a U.S. patent for a method to chemically synthesize a version of AST, which in its natural state can be difficult to harvest in sufficient quantities to treat diseases affecting millions worldwide.
“It’s very exciting,” Rosen says of the lab-made version, “and from a public health standpoint, the work is extremely important.”
In the United States alone, for example, some 2.8 million people are infected annually with drug-resistant bacteria, and 35,000 die as a result, according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.
Arsenic has been noted by scientists as “one of the most interesting and enigmatic elements of the periodic table” for both its use as an intentional poison and as a medicinal agent, particularly in the fight against some cancers. Lab tests conducted by FIU proved AST effectively defeated the most notorious, including E. coli and Mycobacteria, which cause tuberculosis.
Another critical characteristic of the lab-made version: It can easily be modified, the researchers say, making possible its use one day as a treatment for a host of other diseases. “We see this as the first member of a family of arsenic-based drugs,” Rosen says.
Most recently, the team tested the AST against Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes malaria. An estimated 249 million malaria cases and 608,000 malaria deaths were recorded, mostly in developing countries, in 2022.
The researchers found that AST not only successfully treats malaria but could potentially prevent further spread of the disease by rendering an ill person no longer infectious. With existing antimalarial drugs, there remains a period of communicability during which a mosquito can pick up the parasite by biting someone under treatment and then transmit it to others. AST, in contrast, would stop the cycle.