Pathogen-specific antibiotics would help minimise the harm caused to the “good bacteria” in the human microbiome, and in turn, result in a more effective cure for illnesses caused by the bacteria and a lower amount of antibiotic resistance, said Nobel laureate Prof Ada E Yonath, who delivered the 8th JBS Haldane lecture at the KIIT University here on Saturday.
Prof Yonath expressed high praise for Indian scientists. She particularly mentioned Prof V Ramakrishnan, with whom she shared the 2009 Chemistry Nobel Prize.
Prof Yonath also visited the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS), the largest free residential tribal institute in the world, and interacted with the students. Commending KIIT & KISS founder Dr Achyuta Samanta for his selfless service for the underprivileged children, she said, “My country Israel has 25,000 students, but here at KISS, I see the same numbers. KISS is really impressive.”
Prof Yonath received the Haldane lecture Award from Dr Samanta. The KIIT School of Biotechnology has been organising the lecture series in honour of celebrated scientist JBS Haldane since 2013.
The topic of Prof Yonath’s lecture was “Challenges in contemporary medicine: Focus on microbiome, Resistance to antibiotics, and environmental hazards”.
She said most modern antibiotics act by interfering with ribosomal functions in bacteria. Antibiotics bind to important sites on the ribosomes of bacterial pathogens, preventing the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Without essential proteins, the pathogen dies.
All antibiotics are meant to kill bacteria, whether good or bad. “We’re trying to design pathogen specific antibiotics,” she informed. For this structure of the pathogen needs to be identified quickly.
Now, it is possible to identify the structure of a particular pathogen in three to six months through crystal microscope, noted Prof Yonath, the Martin S and Helen Kimmel Professor of Structural Biology and Director of the Helen and Milton A Kimmelman Centre for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. “Resistance to antibiotics is one of the most severe problems in modern medicines. It is unlikely we can ever eliminate antibiotic resistance as bacteria want to live. They find a way to exist by modifying the anchors that antibiotics bind to, and they can do it very quickly,” said Prof Yonath.
However, there are ways to combat bacterial resistance. For example, drugs made of two compounds can reinforce each other and can bind with more anchors on ribosomes, increasing the potency of the antibiotics manifold. These alternative interactions reduce the rate of bacterial resistance, she explained.