A SOFTWARE : PREDICTS HOW BACTERIA REACT TO NEW DRUGS

Number of studies and researches has been conducted in relation to drug resistant infections.

A recent study has predicted that drug resistant infections will kill an extra 10 million people a year worldwide.

With increase in drug resistant bacteria it is been getting difficult to control even common infections like pneumonia or urinary tract infections. 

New drugs are desperately needed, and so are ways to maximize the effective lifespan of these drugs.

Now, researchers have developed a computer algorithm that can help in this area

Now a team of researchers at Duke University may have 

alighted on a solution. In a recently published  study in the journal

               Proceedings of the National Academy of 

                     Sciences, 

the researchers’ software, OSPREY, was able to predict the most likely mutations to come out of certain bacteria.

The new software called OSPREY can predict long-term effectiveness of new drugs ahead of time, before the drug is even tested on patients, the researchers noted.

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describes how they tested OSPREY with the superbug MRSA  (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus).

The researchers programmed the algorithm to identify the genetic changes that MRSA would have to undergo in order to become resistant to a promising new class of experimental drug. And when they exposed MRSA to the new drugs, they found some of the genetic changes the software had predicted actually arose.

When the researchers treated live bacteria with the new drug, two of the genetic changes actually arose, just as their algorithm predicted.

“This gives us a window into the future to see what bacteria will do to evade drugs that we design before a drug is deployed,” said co-author Bruce Donald, a professor of computer science and biochemistry at Duke.

Because bacteria reproduce so rapidly -- growing and dividing from one cell to two in less than an hour -- drug-resistant bacteria are constantly evolving, and researchers have to constantly develop new ways to kill them.

Since the first antibacterial drugs were introduced in the 1940s, bacteria have evolved ways to resist every new antibiotic that has been developed -- a process that has been accelerated by the use of antibiotics in livestock to help them gain weight, and in humans to treat viral infections that antibiotics are powerless to cure

Their computational approach could be especially useful for forecasting drug resistance mutations in other diseases, such as cancer, HIV and influenza, where raising resistant cells or strains in the lab is more difficult to do than with bacteria, the researchers say.

The software they developed, called OSPREY, is open-source and freely available for any researcher to use.