Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University say that Vitamin C is effective in killing drug-resistant TB bacteria.
Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Yeshiva University conducted a new study to find ways in which TB treatment therapies could be shortened. During their study they found that if vitamin C is added to existing TB drugs used to treat the illness, the treatment duration is shortened as vitamin C kills the drug-resistant TB bacteria.
The illness is caused due to bacteria known as M tuberculosis. According to a World Health Organization report, 8.7 million people were diagnosed with the illness in 2011 while 1.4 million of them died.
"We hypothesized that TB bacteria that can't make mycothiol might contain more cysteine, an amino acid," said William Jacobs, Jr., Ph.D., professor of microbiology & immunology and of genetics at Einstein. "So, we predicted that if we added isoniazid and cysteine to isoniazid-sensitive M. Tuberculosis in culture, the bacteria would develop resistance. Instead, we ended up killing off the culture- something totally unexpected."
Cysteine acted as a reducing agent by killing the bacteria, in turn causing the production of reactive oxygen species that are capable of destroying DNA. To confirm the findings, researchers conducted a repeat experiment where they used isoniazid and vitamin C. They found that vitamin C not only killed the drug-resistant bacteria but also MDR-TB and XDR-TB strains.
"We don't know whether vitamin C will work in humans, but we now have a rational basis for doing a clinical trial," said Dr. Jacobs.
The study was published in the journal Nature.
