The existing treatment for Lyme disease is standard antibiotics, which kill the infection except for 20% of the population with the illness. For those people, the antibiotics don’t work, and symptoms of fatigue, cognitive impairment, and muscle pain may linger for years, and in some cases, indefinite.
However, that’s about to change, as a new Stanford Medicine study in mice and lab dishes shows evidence that the drug azlocillin completely kills off the disease-causing bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi at the start of the sickness. The study, published in Scientific Reports, also suggests that Azlocillin could potentially be an effective treatment for patients infected with other kinds of drug-tolerant bacteria that cause lingering symptoms.
Jayakumar Rajadas, the study’s senior author, said:
This compound is just amazing. It clears the infection without a lot of side effects. We are hoping to repurpose it as an oral treatment for Lyme disease.
Rajadas has A Ph.D. in Biophysical Chemistry and is the assistant professor of medicine and director of the Biomaterials & Advanced Drug Delivery Laboratory at the Stanford School of Medicine.
Venkata Raveendra Pothineni, the lead author of the study, added:
We have been screening potential drugs for six years. We’ve screened almost 8,000 chemical compounds. We have tested 50 molecules in the dish. The most effective and safest molecules were tested in animal models. Along the way, I’ve met many people suffering from this horrible, lingering disease. Our main goal is to find the best compound for treating patients and stop this disease.
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that over 300,000 people get infected with Lyme disease each year. It can affect numerous organs, including the heart, brain, joints, nervous system, and skin if untreated. Symptoms include headaches, chills, fever, joint, and muscle pain. Additionally, the disease can cause arthritis and heart problems.
In 2011, Rajadas and his team were frustrated with the lack of treatments for Lyme disease patients with lingering symptoms, so they began hunting for a better alternative. In 2016, they published a detailed study in Drug Design, Development & Therapy that compiled 20 chemical compounds out of 4,000, that were found to be the most effective at killing the infection in mice. The FDA approved all 20 compounds for various uses, including to treat alcohol abuse disorder.
Azlocillin is one of these 20 compounds, and in this latest study, it proved to be more effective in killing B. burgdorferi, with fewer side-effects, than a total of 7,450 competing compounds.
The drug, which hasn’t reached the market yet, was also shown to be effective in killing drug-tolerant forms of B. burgdorferi in mice and lab dishes, indicating its potential as a therapy for lingering symptoms of Lyme disease. Rajadas and Pothineni have already patented Azlocillin for the treatment of Lyme disease and are working with a company to produce an oral form of the drug.
