New antibiotic class shows potential against gonorrhoea

A new class of antibiotics has shown potential efficacy in the treatment of the sexually-transmitted disease gonorrhoea.

Researchers from Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine have tested a new antibiotic, closthioamide, on 149 samples of N. gonorrhoeae from hospital patients with infections in the throat, urethra, cervix and rectum.

In this laboratory setting, very low amounts of closthioamide were shown to be effective against 146 of 149 samples, and against all of the samples provided by the World Health Organization (WHO) which were known to be resistant to other antibiotics.

This is an important discovery, as the WHO recently estimated that 700,000 people die annually from drug-resistant infections, with the organisation specifically citing drug-resistant gonorrhoea as a high-priority infection that poses a great threat to human health.

Dr John Heap, lead author from Imperial's department of life sciences, said: "The imminent threat of untreatable antibiotic-resistant infectious diseases, including gonorrhoea, is a global problem, for which we urgently need new antibiotics. This new finding might help us take the lead in the arms race against antimicrobial resistance."

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