How an HKU-developed eczema product could help fight superbug threat

When Scottish doctor Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered the first antibiotic in 1928, he changed the course of history, extending global life expectancy by decades and saving millions of lives on the battlefield and beyond. But humanity’s dependence on his discovery has fuelled a modern crisis: antimicrobial resistance, or AMR. Decades of overuse and misuse of antibiotics have allowed “superbugs” – bacteria that have mutated to survive treatments – to evolve. According to a 2014 British study, AMR infections may kill 10 million people annually by 2050, surpassing cancer as a leading cause of death if no intervention is taken. To address this problem, scientists at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) have developed a skincare product for eczema that aims to control bacterial infections without killing the microbes. Patients are especially vulnerable to AMR infections because of their heavy reliance on antibiotics to manage their skin condition, according to Richard Kao Yi-tsun, an associate professor of microbiology at HKU. “A healthy human body naturally hosts 500 to over 1,000 different species of bacteria, forming an equilibrium [and] a protective shield against harmful bacteria,” Kao said. Misuse or overuse of antibiotics disrupts this very equilibrium. “Antibiotics cannot selectively target the single, infection-causing bacteria, [and] could almost wipe out the entire microbiota, both the good and bad ones, vacating a vast amount of space,” he said. “Any bacteria that have a mutation that makes them immune to antibiotics would then have a massive advantage because they face zero competition. “The entire space is theirs, they can multiply exponentially within a short period of time … and become superbugs.” Kao warned that if superbugs become dominant, humanity would return to a “pre-antibiotic” era in which standard treatments would become useless and a routine bacterial infection would become fatal again. Eczema is a condition affecting 800 million people, or 10 per cent of the world’s population. In Hong Kong, one in every five residents is affected by the condition. “The more antibiotics you use, the higher the risk of developing AMR,” Kao said. The plant-based moisturiser formula called Anesinin focuses on “taming” golden staph, which is commonly found in eczema lesions and has caused AMR in many patients. In 2017, a strain of golden staph that is resistant to methicillin was classified as a “high priority pathogen” by the World Health Organization, and has remained on the list since then. The WHO said its resistance to common antibiotics had posed a global public health threat. Kao said golden staph was found to trigger an agonising itch by secreting a cocktail of toxins that broke through the compromised skin barrier of eczema patients to cause inflammation, while directly stimulating the body’s sensory neurons to send an instant itch signal to the brain. “The concept of taming is like turning a lion into a sheep … we do not kill the bacteria, but cut off their virulence mechanisms that attack your body,” he said. “The bacteria remain active and thriving … but because their survival is not threatened, they would not [have their selective pressure triggered to] select for drug-resistant mutant strains.” As a result, the bacteria were transformed from an aggressive colony waiting to invade open wounds into a “peaceful, harmless community” that coexisted in harmony, while the toxins causing inflammation and nerve impulses were suppressed, he said. Kao stressed that Anesinin was never positioned to be a treatment, but a moisturiser that could alleviate flare-ups, reduce antibiotic use and enhance quality of life. The product contains nothing incompatible with steroids and biologics – common treatments of eczema – either. The research team collected feedback from about 50 users. More than 70 per cent of users reported a noticeable improvement in itching relief and eczema recovery, while 25 per cent described the result as “highly effective”, after using it for seven days. Looking ahead, Kao said the team was hoping to apply the insight to medical devices such as advanced bandages and hydrogels to prevent golden staph from impacting wound recovery. In the long run, the team hoped to target the treatment of life-threatening infections caused by golden staph, such as pneumonia, myocarditis, sepsis and more. The team is now exploring the Southeast Asia and mainland Chinese markets. Nevertheless, Kao stressed that antibiotics were not an enemy of humanity, as they played an important role in modern medicine. “Antibiotics are for sure our friends, but we cannot misuse them because that would only make them useless,” he said. Kao said the local use of antibiotics was largely proper because of the absence of large-scale farming businesses, the world’s biggest consumer of the drugs. Antibiotics are not available over-the-counter, and authorities have launched extensive education campaigns, although he noted that some private doctors still prescribed antibiotics as a precautionary measure to prevent secondary bacterial infections. “The key message is that antibiotics are only effective on bacterial infections, but not viral infections such as the common cold,” he said. “If the world is committed to minimising the use of antibiotics with the help of new technology, we could reserve antibiotics strictly for medical emergencies, such as when a patient suffers from a serious bacterial infection, but you do not know the exact strain.”

How an HKU-developed eczema product could help fight superbug threat

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Scientists develop plant-based moisturiser that ‘turns lions into sheep’, taming bacteria causing eczema itch and reducing antibiotic reliance

Scientists develop plant-based moisturiser that ‘turns lions into sheep’, taming bacteria causing eczema itch and reducing antibiotic reliance