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ANTIMICROBIAL RESISTANCE

A long history of β-lactams for MRSA

Nature Microbiology volume 4, pages 1604–1605 (2019)Cite this article

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Since the emergence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus 60 years ago, scientists have been trying to engineer β-lactam antibiotics to restore drug susceptibility. Genomic data now shows that clavulanic acid (a β-lactamase inhibitor) can restore susceptibility in many strains, but only if they carry key mutations.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is the pathogen that keeps clinical infection specialists up at night, with resistance to nearly all β-lactam antibiotics and a propensity to cause significant mortality. MRSA became an epidemic across the world in the 1990s, with lineages spreading successfully in nearly all clinical settings, and despite approvals for new treatments (for example, linezolid in 2000, daptomycin in 2003, ceftaroline in 2010 and ceftobiprole in 2013), there were still approximately 120,000 S. aureus bacteraemia cases in the United States alone in 2017 and 20,000 deaths1.

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Fig. 1: Evolution of penicillin–clavulanic acid susceptibility.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Infection Science, North Bristol NHS Trust, Bristol, UK

    Fergus Hamilton & Alasdair MacGowan

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  1. Fergus Hamilton
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  2. Alasdair MacGowan
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Correspondence to Fergus Hamilton.

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Hamilton, F., MacGowan, A. A long history of β-lactams for MRSA. Nat Microbiol 4, 1604–1605 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-019-0561-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-019-0561-z

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