For the generations of high school students whose English class assignments included reading Joseph Kesselring’s play, “Arsenic and Old Lace,” the idea of arsenic as an aid to health seems either amusing or frightening.
But a group of Florida International University researchers from the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine and an international team from Japan have discovered a new broad-spectrum antibiotic that contains arsenic, FIU announced Tuesday.
Broad-spectrum means “an antibiotic is effective against many types of bacteria,” FIU’s Barry Rosen, the co-senior author of the study that was published Monday in Nature’s Communication Biology, said of arsinothricin, also known as AST.
This is important, FIU’s scientists explained, because antibiotic resistance — when the body’s immune system doesn’t react to the antibiotic’s healing properties and the germs, or bacteria, are not killed or stopped as expected — is a growing problem. The FIU medical school called antibiotic resistance “one of the biggest public health threats of our time.”
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