Researchers at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital have discovered a way to turn a multi-drug bacterium’s defenses against itself, a finding that opens new pathways to help combat increases in antibiotic-resistant infections. The research, published in Nature Biotechnology , details the use of a structurally modified form of the drug florfenicol hijacks the resistance mechanism in Mycobacterium abscessus , to amplify the drug’s effect “in perpetuity.”

“One of the most prominent groups at risk of M. abscessus infections is critically ill patients, like we have at St. Jude,” said senior author Richard Lee, PhD, a member of the department of chemical biology and therapeutics at St. Jude. “Since this bacterium is intrinsically resistant, treating patients with strong antibiotics

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