The FDA approved drug, cholestyramine, has been shown to assist in antibiotic resistance. According to researchers at Penn State and the University of Michigan, cholestyramine used in conjunction with antibiotics prevents antimicrobial resistance. Their findings are published in the journal,eLife.
"Antimicrobial resistance is a serious problem that has led to people dying from common bacterial infections," said Andrew Read, Evan Pugh Professor and Director of the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, Penn State. "Many of our most important antibiotics are failing, and we are beginning to run out of options. We have created a therapy that may help in the fight against antimicrobial resistance, an 'anti-antibiotic' that allows antibiotic treatment without driving the evolution and onward transmission of resistance."
"E. faecium is an opportunistic pathogen that colonizes the human gastrointestinal tract and spreads via fecal-oral transmission," said Valerie Morley, postdoctoral scholar in the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, Penn State. "The bacterium is asymptomatic in the gut but can cause serious infections, such as sepsis and endocarditis, when introduced to sites like the bloodstream or the spinal cord."
The research team investigated whether the orally administered adjuvant cholestyramine could reduce daptomycin activity in the GI tract and prevent the emergence of daptomycin-resistant E. faecium in the gut. They discovered that cholestyramine reduced fecal shedding of daptomycin-resistant VR E. faecium in daptomycin-treated mice by up to 80-fold.
"We have shown that cholestyramine binds the antibiotic daptomycin and can function as an 'anti-antibiotic' to prevent systemically administered daptomycin from reaching the gut," said Read.