Did you ever run across something and think, “Damned.  How come I didn’t think of that?”   Here’s one of my recent revelations.

Dr. Hinrich Schulenburg [U Kiel] led a team (Drs. A Batra, S. Franzenburg, and  R. Roemhild [U Kiel Germany], E. Rousseau and S. Niemann [Borstel Research Center, Germany]) that explored their novel- but straight-forward-  hypothesis.  The results were reported in eLife Sciences in an article titled “High potency of sequential therapy with only β-lactam antibiotics”.

First, what are β-lactam antibiotics?  These are compounds like penicillin, cephalosporin, carbapenems, and carbacephems.  All of which contain the lactam ring (highlighted above) in their structures.   I am sure  you recognize that these antibiotics have been around a long, long time- and because of improper use (instead of taking 10 days dosage- we stop after a few days when we feel better; we dump excess pills down the toilet; we use these antibiotics for animal feed; etc.), the gram-negative microbial population have been able to develop resistance to the drugs.  Which means, the drugs don’t always kill the microbe we need to eradicate from our bodies.

Now, these researchers were challenging the widely held belief that treating microbial infections with related (these were all beta-lactam) antibiotics would promote resistance.   By using Pseudomonas aeruginosa (multiple evolutions- in other words, the original population had already expired and these were progeny- where any developed resistance, if any, would be clearly evident), they proved that not to be the case.

The results were pretty informative.  Not only did the sequential three-day regimen not lead to microbial resistance- it actually was more effective at killing the microbes than a single drug regimen.   BUT…

This study was done using P. aeruginosa growing in Petri dishes- not in humans.  So, human test protocols need to be effected to determine if real life human data substantiates the lab data.

And, then, a process by which folks can easily alternate the pills from day 1 to day 2 to day 3 needs to be developed (which means packaging them kind of like the old birth control pills [shown above]), where one took a specified pill from a slot each day.

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