MRSA Notes

From acs.org:

The natural product vancomycin is an antibiotic of last resort, used when other antibacterial agents aren’t effective. But some bacteria have developed resistance to vancomycin. Researchers have now designed and synthesized a revamped form of vancomycin that makes such resistance futile, or at least a lot more difficult.

Bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus, a cause of food poisoning and a source of hospital infections, have developed resistance to a number of antibiotics but not to vancomycin—yet. When they do develop resistance to vancomycin, “as many suspect is just a matter of time, we will be in trouble,” says chemistry professor Dale L. Boger of Scripps Research Institute.

In an effort to prepare for such an eventuality, graduate student Brendan M. Crowley and Boger reengineered vancomycin to make it much more resistance-proof and devised a way to synthesize the modified version from simple starting materials (J. Am. Chem. Soc., published online Feb. 4, dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja0572912).

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