Breakthrough antibiotic treatment could ease daily struggles for Crohn’s patients in new discovery

Excerpt from the Press Release:

Researchers from McMaster University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a new antibiotic that could change the way doctors treat Crohn’s disease and other forms of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

The drug enterololin is the first of its kind and is designed to target harmful bacteria in the gut without wiping out the “good” bacteria that keep the microbiome healthy.

The breakthrough, described this week in Nature Microbiology, is paired with another first: the use of artificial intelligence to predict exactly how the new drug works, a step that normally takes years and millions of dollars to complete.

“This is sort of our first entry into a new way of addressing this burdensome disease,” principal investigator Jon Stokes said in a Zoom interview with CTVNews.ca Thursday. “We don’t have drugs to treat these infections in Crohn’s patients.”

Traditional antibiotics tend to be “broad spectrum,” meaning they are blunt instruments that destroy good bacteria along with bad ones. For patients with Crohn’s disease, this can backfire: when protective gut microbes are wiped out, drug-resistant species like E. coli can rush in and worsen the disease, according to the study.

Enterololin is a narrow-spectrum antibiotic, the study suggests, meaning it goes after a specific group of harmful bacteria known as the Enterobacteriaceae family. This includes E. Coli, while leaving the rest of the microbiome intact.

In mouse studies, the drug cleared infections but also reduced the risk of dangerous, drug-resistant strains taking hold in the gut.

A lucky find

In the lab, Stokes said researchers typically screen tens of thousands of chemicals to see which would kill a bacterium of interest, and which ones won’t.

“We’ll train an AI model to be able to look at the structures of brand new chemicals it’s never seen before and predict which ones could be anti-bacterial,” he added.

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