Vitamin C: A Potential Cure for Drug-Resistant TB Bacteria

Sharon Moore August 30, 2013

Tuberculosis has once been a threat to thousands of people, especially those who have low immune system. But the arrival of highly potent antibiotics has relieved many scared patients who thought they would never be cured. But then tuberculosis has made a huge comeback, carrying a strain of bacteria that is multi-drug resistant.

The bacteria strain, called MDR-TB, plagues people from less developed countries, especially those who are less fortunate and have poor immune systems. What’s more disturbing is that about a third of infected people don’t manifest symptoms, but are carriers of the disease. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), there have been 9 million cases of TB worldwide in 2011. Of these people, 1.5 million died. Currently, there are around 650,000 people who are infected with MDR-TB. Even worse, tuberculosis bacteria, the XDR-TB or extensively drug-resistant TB, affects close to 10 per cent of people with MDR-TB.

Vitamin C kills drug resistant tuberculosis

Whilst examining how TB bacterium becomes resistant to the normal protocol of first line TB antibiotics, scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in NYC stumbled upon a potential cure for MDR-TB and XDR-TB – vitamin C. In one of their experiments, the researchers bred a TB bacteria culture to see how the said type of bacteria would resist isoniazid (INH), a premier first line TB antibiotic. However, they observed that the isoniazid-resistant TB bacteria lacked the mycothiol molecule.

"We hypothesized that TB bacteria that can’t make mycothiol might contain more cysteine, an amino acid. 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" said Dr. William Jacobs, a PhD microbiologist at Albert Einstein College.

Their experiment led to vitamin C killing not only the normally-susceptible-to-isoniazid TB bacterium, but also the multi-drug resistant MDR-TB and XDR-TB strains, which are very resistant to drugs.

"We now have a rational basis for doing a clinical trial," Dr. Jacobs said conclusively. "Vitamin C is inexpensive, widely available and very safe to use. At the very least, this work shows us a new mechanism that we can exploit to attack TB."

Source of this article:

Vitamin C kills drug-resistant TB bacteria: Study