BRITISH and Indian researchers have joined forces to curb “superbugs” evolving due to the impact of pharmaceutical waste release on microbial ecosystems.
Scientists in India and the UK noted that waste generated by India’s drug manufacturing industry could be damaging environmental bacteria, and leading to creation of the antibiotic-resistant superbugs.
Most of the world’s antibiotics are produced in Indian pharmaceutical factories, either through chemical synthesis, or by growing huge volumes of the micro-organisms that naturally produce them.
Both methods generate large quantities of waste, potentially containing active antibiotics, and chemicals which may be toxic to bacteria and other cell types.
Though the waste usually goes through treatment plants before being released into the environment, experts have raised concerns over their efficiency.
About 58,000 babies die in India every year from superbug infections passed on from their mothers, whilst drug-resistant pathogens cause between up to 38,000 extra deaths in the European Union every year.
The UK-India joint project, announced last week, will try to determine how much active antibiotic is released from production units, and analyse which other potentially toxic chemicals the medical waste might contain.
Led by scientists at the University of Birmingham, the ‘SELECTAR project’ will include experts from the University of Leeds, Aligarh Muslim University, Panjab University (Chandigarh), CSIR-Central Drug Research Institute (Lucknow), Indian Institute of Technology (Delhi) and Jamia Millia Islamia University (Delhi).
Project lead Professor Alan McNally, from the University of Birmingham, said antibiotics were vital “wonder drugs”, but the waste generated while producing them posed an “enormous potential issue”.
“Put simply, the more we expose bacteria to antibiotics the more likely they may be to evolve resistance to the drugs meaning they can’t be used to treat infections,” he explained.
“We desperately need to know exactly how much the release of antibiotic production waste leads to increasing antimicrobial resistance, which could ultimately plunge medicine back into the dark ages.”
Professor Iqbal Ahmed, of Aligarh Muslim University, said the more bacteria to get exposed to antibiotics “the faster they evolve resistance to the drugs, meaning they can’t be used to treat infections”.
“Our approach will allow us to determine exactly what effect the waste has on the microbial ecosystem; does it kill all beneficial bacteria to only leave harmful resistant bacteria alive,” he added.
Supported by over £790,000 funding from UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) Fund for International Collaboration, the UK-Indian team of scientists will study environments into which antibiotic production waste is released, and compare them with pristine environments.
The project will be executed as part of an £8-million UK-India package for research aimed at “deepening existing scientific research collaboration”, with five new programmes to boost the global fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria and genes.
