Australia Seeks Medicines Breakthrough from Flies

Sept. 30, 2002
By Michael Byrnes

SYDNEY (Reuters) - If flies are happy gorging on dung and rotting flesh, they must surely have powerful built-in resistance to infection.

Following this theory, a team of Australian scientists is working to produce revolutionary new antibiotics, made from flies and other creepy crawlies, to replace the antibiotics that infections are rapidly developing resistance against.

"We ask the question, 'Where would antimicrobials have evolved naturally?"' Macquarie University professor Andy Beattie told Reuters. "We're looking at something totally different."

This is the first time flies had been specifically targeted for pharmaceutical products, said Beattie, whose work is even drawing support from competitors.

Macquarie University's work was scientifically "perfectly valid," said Dr. Stephen Trowell, chief scientific officer of Entocosm Pty Ltd.

Entocosm, recently established by the Australian government-backed Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) to produce a wide range of therapeutic drugs from the virtually untapped source of insects, was also producing "some very exciting results," he said.

Harvesting antibiotics from flies is one of many possibilities suggested by Beattie's targeted research approach.

He thought that insects which live in highly organized societies, like humans, might have stronger defense mechanisms.

Research proved him right. He now has a patent on antibiotics from bull ants, a large aggressive Australian ant.

On similar reasoning, spider webs, pieces of pure protein dangling in the air, may contain super defenses, he said.

So might nectar, which plants have to defend against contamination so they can attract pollinators.

"There's some evidence for that too," Beattie said.

Beattie is still waiting for a commercial go-ahead for his bull ant antibiotic. Whether it might be targeted against specific diseases or used as a general antiseptic would depend on drug companies, he said.

FLY MUSH

One of the great strengths of the research on flies was that it focused on entirely novel molecules, Beattie said.

"The problem with most of the antibiotics on the market is they're chemically related. Evolution of resistance to one means the evolution of cross-resistance," he said.

Entocosm says four million species of insects are a virtually untouched potential source of antibiotics, anti-cancer agents, blood thinners, and other therapeutic substances.

Beattie said it was too early to say if the research team, led by Joanne Clarke and financially backed by drug giant Glaxo Smith Kline, would lead to a patent on antibiotics extracted from the flies using solvents.

"(But) we certainly get a lot of antimicrobial activity."

Commercial production of fly antibiotics could be 10 years away because of drawn-out drug company procedures, Beattie said.

But preliminary work had shown the compounds produced by flies were active against bacteria including the deadly "superbug" golden staph, which is infesting hospitals around the world, and the common gut bug, E coli.

Clarke's work has shown the antibiotics are produced by the flies during their larval and adult stages, when they live and eat in dirty environments. But they are not produced during the middle stage, as pupae, when they have a protective casing.

Australia was at the forefront of scientific work on producing antibiotics from insects because of the huge diversity of insects in the country, Trowell said.

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