Vancomycin review and PBT2

Queensland University professors, who once patented PBT2 in infections, published a vancomycin review, and it had one PBT2 chapter:

3.12. Reversing Antibiotic Resistance

PBT2 is a safe-for-human-use zinc ionophore previously developed to treat neurodegenerative diseases, which has been shown to break resistance to multiple classes of antibiotics in a variety of animal models [601,602,603,604]. Bohlmann et al. showed that PBT2, in the presence of zinc, is bactericidal against MRSA and VRE. In addition, it also reverses acquired bacterial resistance to many clinical antibiotics including vancomycin at sub-inhibitory concentrations. The combination of PBT2 + zinc + vancomycin also significantly reduced VRE infection in a murine wound infection model. The authors were unable to select for mutants resistant to PBT2 + zinc treatment [601]. PBT2 and zinc was also able to break intrinsic polymyxin resistance in MRSA and VRE in vitro as demonstrated by De Oliveira et al. [603], highlighting the utility of PBT2 to reverse both intrinsic and acquired mechanisms of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Other studies investigating the utility of using natural products [605], traditional medicines [606] and other existing non-antibiotic drugs [607,608] in reversing antibiotic resistance in S. aureus and/or enterococci have also been published.