Scientist Counters Drug Resistant Bacteria With Aggression -- How Antibiotics Tear Apart Viruses

There is an impending evolutionary arms race between deadly bacteria and antibiotics. Scientists may have found another novel, yet primal, way to make existing drugs more effective against antibiotic resistance.

According to Telegraph, the solution came in the form of a skin infection drug called oritavancin. When compared to vancomycin, an actual last-resort drug, they found out that the former was actually 11,000 times stronger than the former. In fact, it exerted too much force on the bacteria that it tore it apart.

The woman behind the discovery is a 25-year-old Ph.D. student named Shu Lam. Lam figured out that if an antibiotic produced just enough force towards a bacteria, it can "forcibly" kill it by tearing it apart. It's an aggressive approach but effective.

According to Joseph Ndieyira from the University College London, antibiotics work in such a way that they "bind" to a bacteria first before it kills them. However, as he explained in Medical Daily, evolution also allows bacteria to evolve against such a binding, allowing them to "close" themselves from antibiotics before they even work.

Independent notes that bacteria are growing even stronger, some of them are already resistant to "last resort" antibiotics. These are medicines that are used only when all else fails -- and if these fail, then humanity is in for a supervirus that can kill everyone.

The issue regarding antibiotics and bacteria got too extreme that London Prime Minister David Cameron has already warned the public of such consequences if this problem is not resolved.

Scientists are now trying to find more of these antibiotics that exert the same physical stress to their "assigned" viruses. Hopefully, this can herald a "new generation" of drugs that can defeat all sorts of superbugs.