Narrow-spectrum antibiotic

A narrow-spectrum antibiotic is an antibiotic that is only able to kill or inhibit limited species of bacteria.[1]

Advantages
  • Narrow-spectrum antibiotic allow to kill only those bacteria species that are unwanted (i.e. causing disease). As such, it leaves the beneficial bacteria unaffected, hence minimizing the collateral damage effect on the microbiota.[2][3]
  • Low propensity for bacterial resistance development.[4]

Disadvantages

Often, the exact species of bacteria causing the illness is unknown, in which case narrow-spectrum antibiotics can't be used, and broad-spectrum antibiotics are used instead. To know the exact species of bacteria causing the illness, samples need to be taken, the bacteria needs to be grown further and the DNA of the sample needs to be sequenced (a process which in some cases may take up to 10 weeks). New DNA sequencers, specialised for this use (i.e. Mykrobe Predictor TB[5], KvarQ, PhyResSE, and TBProfiler[6]), are starting to appear which can perform this task within one hour.[7][8]

See also

References
  1. Hopkins SJ (1997). Drugs and Pharmacology for Nurses (12th ed.). Churchill Livingstone. ISBN 978-0-443-05249-1.
  2. Blaser M (August 2011). "Antibiotic overuse: Stop the killing of beneficial bacteria". Nature. 476 (7361): 393–4. doi:10.1038/476393a. PMID 21866137.
  3. Keener AB (9 May 2016). "Narrow-Spectrum Antibiotic Could Spare the Microbiome". The Scientist Magazine®. Retrieved 2020-06-07.
  4. Melander RJ, Zurawski DV, Melander C (2018). "Narrow-Spectrum Antibacterial Agents". MedChemComm. 9: 12–21. doi:10.1039/c7md00528h. PMC 5839511. PMID 29527285.
  5. Mykrobe Predictor
  6. Schleusener V, Köser CU, Beckert P, Niemann S, Feuerriegel S (April 2017). "Mycobacterium tuberculosis resistance prediction and lineage classification from genome sequencing: comparison of automated analysis tools". Scientific Reports. 7: 46327. doi:10.1038/srep46327. PMID 28425484.
  7. Mahé P, El Azami M, Barlas P, Tournoud M (2019). "Mycobacterium tuberculosis". PeerJ. 7: e6857. doi:10.7717/peerj.6857. PMC 6500375. PMID 31106066.
  8. Bradley P, Gordon NC, Walker TM, Dunn L, Heys S, Huang B, et al. (December 2015). "Rapid antibiotic-resistance predictions from genome sequence data for Staphylococcus aureus and Mycobacterium tuberculosis". Nature Communications. 6: 10063. doi:10.1038/ncomms10063. PMC 4703848. PMID 26686880.

Further reading
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