A disservice

Antibiotics prevent the immune system from fighting bacteria

Kirill Stasevich, "Science and Life"

We take antibiotics for bacterial infections – they are supposed to help the immune system defeat pathogenic bacteria. However, the immune system itself will not necessarily be happy with such help: a recent article in Cell Host & Microbe (Yang et al., Antibiotic-Induced Changes to the Host Metabolic Environment Inhibit Drug Efficacy and Alter Immune Function) states that some antibiotic substances can make bacteria more resistant to both treatment and immune attacks cells.

Some time ago, James Collins and his colleagues from the Broad Institute discovered that certain types of antibiotics damage the mitochondria of mouse and human cells (Antibiotics alter the infectious microenvironment and may reduce the ability of immune cells to kill bacteria).

Mitochondria are special cellular organelles that provide the cell with energy and therefore are literally stuffed with a variety of proteins and molecular complexes. When damaged, biochemical reactions in the mitochondria begin to go wrong; the cell, in turn, is forced to react somehow to what is happening. As a result, a variety of substances, intermediate products of reactions, etc. come out of cells with damaged mitochondria.

The next question is whether such a side effect of antibiotics affects bacteria and immune cells? To find out, the researchers watered mice infected with pathogenic E. coli with water with ciprofloxacin, and the amount of the antibiotic was proportional to what we drink during the illness. The very substances that should appear when the cells have damaged mitochondria appeared in the mouse tissues, and, most importantly, because of these substances, the E. coli became resistant to ciprofloxacin. That is, on the one hand, the antibiotic killed bacteria, but at the same time, acting on the body's own cells, made bacteria difficult to kill.

At the same time, ciprofloxacin directly affected the immune cells of macrophages, whose task is to eat microbes. It turned out that because of the antibiotic, macrophages absorb and kill microbes worse than usual.

Here, however, it is necessary to emphasize several points: firstly, we are talking only about some types of antibiotics, and not about "antibiotics in general"; secondly, it is not yet clear how significant such an effect is in a clinical sense. In other words, can all of the above slow down recovery, is the infection really sitting in the body longer, or are the side effects in this sense not so terrible? 

The answer seems to be obvious: with so many infections, you simply cannot do without antibiotics, without them you will have to get sick for a very long time and very hard. So the moral here is not to give up antibiotics altogether, but that when developing new antibacterial drugs, you need to monitor more carefully how they will interact with our cells; and if some adverse effects cannot be avoided, then you need to try to choose such a therapy scheme, to minimize side effects as much as possible.

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