This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Nearly a century ago, a single colony of Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) helped launch the antibiotic age. In 1928, Alexander Fleming returned to his London lab to find that a stray mold had wiped out the Staphylococcus growing on one of his plates.
The accident gave the world penicillin, ushering in the age of biomedicine and ensuring that an infected cut or scrape would not be fatal. S. aureus was among the first bacteria that penicillin humbled. It is ironic that the same organism now sits on the World Health Organization's roster of most-feared superbugs.
Methicillin-resistant S. aureus, or MRSA, represents the "S" in ESKAPE, a group of six pathogens notorious for their ability to escape or evade multiple antibiotics. The bacterium is notorious for causing skin, bloodstream and surgical-implant infections. Public health officials routinely warn of a "silent pandemic" of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), in which routine medical procedures could once again become life-threatening because of untreatable infections.
According to the 2024 Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance (GRAM) study published in The Lancet, drug-resistant infections could directly kill more than 39 million people between 2025 and 2050, with resistant Staphylococcus infections directly linked to about 130,000 deaths. South Asia, including India, is expected to bear the heaviest burden, with an estimated 11.8 million deaths. It is against this backdrop that a collaborative study involving the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN) has designed a laboratory-made molecule that kills S. aureus by disabling an enzyme most antibiotics ignore.
The study was published in Chemistry & Biodiversity. "Most antibiotics attack bacteria through a handful of familiar routes, including puncturing their walls and jamming their protein-making machinery. The trouble is that bacteria have spent decades learning to dodge those blows," explains Professor Bhaskar Datta, corresponding author of the study and affiliated with IITGN's Departments of Chemistry and Biological Sciences and Engineering.
"Antibiotic resistance is, in many ways, an evolutionary arms race. That is why researchers hunt for fresh points of attack." IITGN researchers, working with colleagues at Jamia Millia Islamia, Jamia Hamdard, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and the Ahmedabad-based company Sushen Medicamentos, decided to try a new approach to tackling the AMR problem. To survive and multiply, every bacterial cell must replicate its genome.
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