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Researchers identify compounds that may treat Lyme persisters more effectively
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Researchers say they demonstrated that strains of Lyme disease found in California ticks are able to form persister bacteria and that several FDA-approved compounds may work better than doxycycline to inhibit these strains in vitro.
No study exists that proves viable infectious organisms persist in individuals with post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome (PTLDS), according to Jayakumar Rajadas, PhD, director of the Biomaterials and Advanced Drug Delivery Laboratory at Stanford University School of Medicine, and colleagues. PTLDS affects from 10% to 20% of Lyme disease patients who experience sustained symptoms such as chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia. There is evidence, however, that Borrelia burgdorferi persists in rodents and nonhuman primates after antibiotic treatment, the researchers said.
Jayakumar Rajadas
This is what makes such research worthwhile, according to Bonnie Crater, vice president of the Bay Area Lyme Foundation, which funded the study published in Drug Design, Development and Therapy.
“New Borrelia persister studies are important to improve our understanding of commonly used Lyme treatments as well as novel uses of other FDA-approved drugs,” Crater told Infectious Disease News.
Rajadas and colleagues tested doxycycline, commonly prescribed for Lyme disease, and found it inhibited only 94% of the tested bacteria from two strains of B. burgdorferi that were chosen because they are common in California ticks. To identify other candidates to test on the bacteria, they used high-throughput screening to search 4,366 chemical compounds from four compound libraries. More than 100 compounds were capable of inhibiting growth of the tested bacteria, the researchers said, including three FDA-approved compounds — azlocillin, gramicidin and cefotaxime — that were more effective at inhibiting persister bacteria than doxycycline. These drugs compounds have the potential to be repurposed to use against Lyme disease and PTLDS, the researchers concluded.
“The identified compounds can potentially provide effective antibacterial cover against the persister forms of B. burgdorferi, if indeed such forms can be proven to exist in patients treated for Lyme disease who remain symptomatic,” they said. – by Gerard Gallagher
Disclosure: Rajadas and another researcher are listed under a patent application assigned to Stanford University for drug combination candidates for the treatment of PTLDS.
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