At 11 million cases annually, urinary tract infections (UTIs) are the most common outpatient infections in the U.S.,
Scientists are developing a new class of antibiotics against urinary tract infections (UTIS).
UTIs affect half of all women at least once in their life and antibiotic treatments are becoming increasingly resistant.
"You can't stop bacteria from evolving and developing resistance to antibiotics," says Mary Rose Ronquillo, an undergraduate student who works in the lab of Scott C. Eagon, Ph.D. "The aim of our research is to develop a drug that acts in a different way from current drugs -- by depriving the bacteria of iron, a key nutrient essential to their survival."
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Scientists are now reporting an early progress toward creating a class of antibiotics that would target infections by starving the culprit bacterium from iron. Their results were presented at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Fall 2020 Virtual Meeting & Expo.
"We selected one of these compounds as a scaffold to modify into potential small molecule inhibitors of the TonB system," M. Cole Detels, an undergraduate student in Eagon's lab, explains. The molecule is called 2-{[(3-chloro-4-methoxyphenyl)amino]methyl}quinolin-8-ol, or more simply, the "hydroxyquinoline scaffold."
Source: Science Daily
