New antibiotic may clear Clostridium difficile and stop reinfection

Clostridium difficile kills 13,000 people each year in the US alone. A new antibiotic tested in mice works better than our first-line treatments against infection – and prevents reinfection too

By Dan Samorodnitsky

8 May 2023

A new antibiotic effectively treats Clostridium difficile infections in mice, and also helps prevent the formation of new spores (pictured in yellow)

Jeshina Janardhanan and Yuanyuan Qian

A new antibiotic is not only more effective than our first-line treatments for Clostridium difficile infections, but it also significantly reduces the risk of reinfection, according to studies in mice.

C. difficile causes symptoms including abdominal cramping, diarrhoea and fever, and in extreme cases severe dehydration and kidney failure. Such infections kill about 13,000 people every year in the US alone.

For that reason, it is one of five antibiotic-resistant infections currently listed by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as “urgent threats”, but its deadliness is really in a class of its own.

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“Clostridium difficile infection results in more than seven times the deaths as the remaining four CDC urgent threats combined,” says Mayland Chang at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and lead author of the study identifying the new antibiotic.

C. difficile infects the gut, often after people have taken antibiotics to clear another infection. That can eliminate their gut microbiome, allowing C. difficile to take up residence, often when people inhale airborne spores in the hospital.

The first-line antibiotic, vancomycin, works well for initial infections, but becomes less effective thereafter.