A discovery by a University of Arizona research team could provide a new way to fight bacterial infections that cause pneumonia, meningitis, sepsis and even the fungus linked to Valley fever.
The findings could be critical to avoiding and curtailing antibiotic resistance, a health threat to people all over the world in which bacterial infections no longer respond to antibiotic treatment.
Scientists with the UA’s Department of Immunobiology have found that a compound called N,N-dimethyldithiocarbamate, or DMDC, acts in a very similar way to common antibiotics if it is bound with copper.
The combination of DMDC and copper has the ability to kill pathogens that cause common respiratory infections, Michael D.L. Johnson, an assistant professor of immunobiology with the UA’s College of Medicine, found.
These findings, which were recently published in the scientific journal “Microbiology Spectrum,” showed that DMDC was able to overcome antibiotic resistance, due to copper toxicity.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2019 that more than 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections occur in the U.S. each year, UA Health Sciences reports.
“We kind of knew that there was a potential for developing compounds that bind with copper and can then be used as antibiotics against different species,” said UA physician-scientist in training, Sanjay Menghani, who worked with Johnson’s team on the research. “We were interested in seeing if we could extend that principle to find one that works against our target bacteria.”
The research lab tested various compounds by incubating bacteria with and without copper, including the compound DMDC, and then conducted tests to see if any changes were caused in the bacteria’s growth over time.
After about two years of testing work, DMDC was the most successful of the compounds that were tested.
Researchers in this laboratory, which is funded by the National Institutes for Health, are exploring not only how copper is toxic, but if there is a way to define the processes of toxicity in the specific bacteria and how it can eliminate bacterial threats.
Copper, which is found naturally in certain foods such as dried fruits and vegetables, as well as vitamins and supplements, is well tolerated in the human body.
“The final question that we’re trying to address and the subject of the manuscript that just got accepted is, ‘Can we weaponize copper?’” Johnson said. “Can we make it into some kind of therapeutic where there’s a copper warhead to take over and poison the bacteria to prevent its growth?”
