Non-antibiotics with antibacterial activity could help in the fight against antimicrobial resistance

Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School have discovered that many drugs used to treat non-infectious diseases can kill bacteria through different modes of action than standard antibiotics. The study, which aimed to identify molecules that can be chemically modified for the development of new antibiotics, identified 186 drugs with antibacterial activity from a pool of over a thousand different compounds. The researchers used DNA sequencing to calculate the frequency of each mutation before and after the drug, and a network-based analysis to uncover similarities among the studied drugs. The findings could open up new possibilities in the battle against antibiotic resistance.