News Release

At Last There's A Way To Fight The Dreaded E.coli

Reports and Proceedings

New Scientist

The agonising gut cramps, bloody diarrhea and life-threatening kidney damage that sometimes result from Escherichia coli O157 infections might soon be preventable. A biotech company in Canada has developed the first drug to treat the condition.

The company says that the drug could have been made available on "compassionate grounds" to help treat the victims of Britain's latest outbreak in Cockermouth, Cumbria, had it been notified earlier. Twenty-two people, half of them children, ended up in hospital after drinking contaminated milk.

"It's a wonderful drug for this terrible, terrible condition," says Howard Trachtman of the Schneider Children's Hospital in New York, who is in charge of a multi-centre trial of the drug in the US and Canada. "The beneficiaries would be patients like those kids." Trachtman says that in trials the drug has reduced by half the risk of patients going on to develop haemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), the stage of disease in which the kidney is damaged.

The drug, which was developed by Synsorb Biotech of Calgary, consists of an inert sphere of silicon dioxide from which multiple copies of a trisaccharide sugar molecule protrude. These mimic the receptors on gut cells to which the bacterium's deadly "shiga" toxin binds. When patients swallow the drug, it reaches the gut undigested and mops up the toxin.

Intensive trials are under way at hospitals throughout the US and Canada. The results of earlier trials in Japan and Argentina have been encouraging, although Japanese recipients received antibiotics as well. Even so, only 1 per cent of patients receiving the combination developed HUS compared with a usual rate of 15 per cent for antibiotics alone.

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Author: Andy Coghlan New Scientist, issue 13 March 99

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