{"id":5440,"date":"2019-07-12T11:15:07","date_gmt":"2019-07-12T15:15:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qa.vet.purdue.edu\/news\/?p=5440"},"modified":"2025-04-09T14:24:58","modified_gmt":"2025-04-09T18:24:58","slug":"cpb-faculty-member-pursues-new-research-on-antibiotic-resistant-infections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/cpb-faculty-member-pursues-new-research-on-antibiotic-resistant-infections.php","title":{"rendered":"CPB Faculty Member Pursues New Research on Antibiotic-resistant Infections"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Dr. Mohamed Seleem, professor of microbiology in PVM\u2019s Department of Comparative Pathobiology<\/a>, is studying whether FDA-approved drugs can treat antibiotic-resistant infections. (Purdue University photo\/Rebecca Wilcox)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

With antimicrobial resistance on the rise, many infections once easily treated are becoming fatal. Vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) is to blame for more than 5% of all deaths attributed to antibiotic-resistant infection in the U.S., second only to MRSA. Led by Dr. Mohamed Seleem, professor of microbiology in Purdue Veterinary Medicine\u2019s Department of Comparative Pathobiology, researchers now are exploring whether they could repurpose some drugs, which have already been approved by the FDA, to treat the infection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enterococci are bacteria that live in everyone\u2019s intestines\nand genital tracts. They\u2019re usually harmless, but sometimes they can cause\ninfection, in which case they\u2019re treated with an antibiotic called vancomycin.\nHowever, enterococci are becoming resistant to the drug at an alarming rate.\nThis is especially true in hospitals, where VRE is most often acquired. About\n20,000 people in the U.S. are infected with VRE each year, and slightly less\nthan 10% of those infections are fatal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen vancomycin doesn\u2019t work, you have to give the patient\nanother antibiotic that kills other bacteria you don\u2019t want to kill,\u201d Dr. Seleem\nsaid. \u201cSo having a drug that would selectively remove the VRE and nothing else\nwould be a great discovery. And it looks like we\u2019ve found several drugs that\ncould work.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In collaboration with Dr. Daniel Flaherty, assistant\nprofessor of medicinal chemistry and molecular pharmacology at Purdue, Dr. Seleem\nwill screen several drugs often used to treat glaucoma, called carbonic\nanhydrase inhibitors (CAIs), to see how well they can treat VRE.  In previous studies in vitro, CAIs were shown\nto be more effective at killing VRE than the drugs typically used to treat it.\nThey were also able to sidestep surrounding microorganisms, which is extremely\nrare, said Dr. Seleem, who researches antimicrobial resistance and infectious\ndisease.  \u201cIn the field of microbiology,\nI have not seen a drug or molecule that specifically kills one kind of\nmicroorganism and doesn\u2019t kill anything else,\u201d he said.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With funding provided by the National Institutes of Health, Dr.\nSeleem will test six pre-approved drugs against VRE. The bacteria can spread to\nseveral different systems within the body and cause other infections, such as\nurinary tract and blood infections. To make sure the drugs work in all of these\ncases, several different models will be used in the study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In previous studies, it took 10 to 15 days for the drugs to\nkill VRE. The researchers are going to try to speed up that process by making\nthe drugs more potent and finding a way to keep them inside the intestine. Once\nCAIs reach the intestine, they\u2019re easily absorbed into the rest of the body.\nBut for them to be effective in killing VRE, they need to stay inside the\nintestine, where they have prolonged exposure to the bacteria.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Flaherty will create several slightly different versions\nof the six original drugs and the best of them will move forward to animal\nstudies. The final product could be a drug given on its own or something to\nwork with current VRE drugs to make them more effective. In prior studies, CAIs\nmade enterococci more sensitive to other drugs, increasing their efficiency. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The last task of the project is to figure out how CAIs kill\nthe bacteria. Although the researchers have observed this phenomenon\nexperimentally, they don\u2019t yet understand how it works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The research aligns with Purdue’s Giant Leaps celebration, acknowledging the University\u2019s global advancements made in health, longevity, and quality of life as part of Purdue\u2019s 150th Anniversary. This is one of the four themes of the yearlong celebration\u2019s Ideas Festival, designed to showcase Purdue as an intellectual center solving real-world issues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With antimicrobial resistance on the rise, many infections once easily treated are becoming fatal. Vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) is to blame for more than 5% of all deaths attributed to antibiotic-resistant infection in the U.S., second only to MRSA. Led by Dr. Mohamed Seleem, professor of microbiology in Purdue Veterinary Medicine\u2019s Department of Comparative Pathobiology, researchers now are exploring whether they could repurpose some drugs, which have already been approved by the FDA, to treat the infection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":5442,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,37,29,11],"tags":[918,123,8,26,602,56,171,1226,1225],"class_list":["post-5440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-faculty-staff","category-infectious-diseases-and-immunology","category-our-people","category-research","tag-antimicrobial-resistance","tag-cpb","tag-faculty","tag-featured-story","tag-giant-leaps","tag-homepage","tag-mohamed-seleem","tag-purdue-150th-anniversary","tag-vancomycin-resistant-enterococci"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5440"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29560,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5440\/revisions\/29560"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}