A team from Leiden has developed an extremely potent antibiotic against Gram-positive bacteria, including drug resistant strains, as reported in a recent study published in Science Translational Medicine.

Readers of C2W | Mens & Molecule will undoubtedly be familiar with antimicrobial resistance and the threat it poses to humanity, with projections of 10 million people dying each year by 2050 due to resistant bacterial infections. Luckily, chemistry has many tools in the toolbox to find solutions for the many types of resistance. To this end Emma van Groesen, Nathaniel Martin and colleagues from Leiden University found a molecular modification that can be made to the clinically used antibiotic vancomycin that results in exceptional activity.

Vancomycin is often a ‘last resort’ antibiotic, but this molecule too suffers from increasingly resistant bacterial strains. ‘In this case, we’re talking primarily about Gram-positive bacteria as opposed to Gram-negative’, says Van Groesen, who obtained her PhD in 2022 and is currently a scientist at a biotech company in Utrecht. Martin, Professor of Biological chemistry, adds: ‘Resistance in both types of bacteria are serious, but looking at sheer numbers, the Gram-positive ones are more common.’