Yes, unfortunately that is an eventuality when dealing with antibiotics. Using “cocktails” of antibiotics helps slow down the rate of resistance as a given bacterium is less likely to be resistant to many antibiotics. Hopefully in the future antibiotics can be used in conjunction with bacteriophages to treat infections. I believe that using these two different vectors would decrease the rate of resistance drastically.
If you continue on with this project what would be your aim or a hypothesis for a future experiment using your results (what are you hoping for this to give to research).
Lets find the MEC (minimum effective concentration)! That’s the most pressing question at the moment. We would like “zoom in” on our dilution series between 50 uM and 25 uM. Therein lies the MEC. As mentioned most of the toxicity data is already known (being an approved cancer drug) so performing that further dilution series would yield very important data
Since antibiotics inhibit the growth of bacteria, is there a chance that a similar compound could be synthesized that also inhibits the growth of eukaryotic cells (i.e. cancers) ?
There are already compounds on the market that inhibit the growth of bacteria (bacteriostatics). Although bacteriostatics and chemotherapeutics have the similar goals (i.e. to inhibit growth) they have different mechanisms. Decitabine targets tumor suppressors which are not present in bacteria (as a bacterium’s goal is to replicate as fast as possible). However decitabine kills bacteria. Due to different mechanisms bacteriostatics and chemotherapeutics are not readily interchangeable
Prior testing showed that a closely related compound azacitidine killed salmonella. Since decitabine and azaciticine are so closely related (off by one hydroxyl) we believed they would have similar effects. In addition to this there was a small amount of clinical research already completed on azacitidine that showed antibiotic effectiveness.
Is there a chance that newly developed families of antibiotics would also eventually cause antibiotic resistance?
Yes, unfortunately that is an eventuality when dealing with antibiotics. Using “cocktails” of antibiotics helps slow down the rate of resistance as a given bacterium is less likely to be resistant to many antibiotics. Hopefully in the future antibiotics can be used in conjunction with bacteriophages to treat infections. I believe that using these two different vectors would decrease the rate of resistance drastically.
If you continue on with this project what would be your aim or a hypothesis for a future experiment using your results (what are you hoping for this to give to research).
Lets find the MEC (minimum effective concentration)! That’s the most pressing question at the moment. We would like “zoom in” on our dilution series between 50 uM and 25 uM. Therein lies the MEC. As mentioned most of the toxicity data is already known (being an approved cancer drug) so performing that further dilution series would yield very important data
Since antibiotics inhibit the growth of bacteria, is there a chance that a similar compound could be synthesized that also inhibits the growth of eukaryotic cells (i.e. cancers) ?
There are already compounds on the market that inhibit the growth of bacteria (bacteriostatics). Although bacteriostatics and chemotherapeutics have the similar goals (i.e. to inhibit growth) they have different mechanisms. Decitabine targets tumor suppressors which are not present in bacteria (as a bacterium’s goal is to replicate as fast as possible). However decitabine kills bacteria. Due to different mechanisms bacteriostatics and chemotherapeutics are not readily interchangeable
Was there a specific criteria you looked at or was there research done to choose a chemotherapeutic compound?
Prior testing showed that a closely related compound azacitidine killed salmonella. Since decitabine and azaciticine are so closely related (off by one hydroxyl) we believed they would have similar effects. In addition to this there was a small amount of clinical research already completed on azacitidine that showed antibiotic effectiveness.