When research loses ground

The solution would therefore be to find compounds that specifically inhibit metallo-beta-lactamases. “But in this case, we are faced with a conflict of interest between the patient and the pharmaceutical industry”, Jean-Marie Frère stresses. “It is in the latter’s interest to design and produce general compounds in order to limit the development costs of such compounds; while for patients – and to fight bacterial resistance in general – it is preferable to have recourse to specific compounds”, the professor stresses. Because the more bacteria we attack at the same time, the more we select the resistance in the various bacterial families. “The best thing would be to develop an ultra-quick identification method for the bacteria and beta-lactamases infecting the patient and to give them a specific treatment”, Jean-Marie Frère concludes. According to the professor, the main research problem in this domain at the moment is the lack of means. “On the one hand, the pharmaceutical industry has lost interest in antibiotics because these drugs aren't profitable enough. They prefer to focus on the production of treatments for chronic illnesses for which patients must take medication throughout their lifetimes”, Jean-Marie Frère observes. “And on the other hand, the public bodies that subsidise research prefer to allocate budgets to other areas of research. It seems that bacteria are no longer fashionable”, he continues. And yet, the race has not stopped. While scientists have to move on through lack of funding, even though the bacteria continue to evolveand will eventually spread and end up winning. Then we shall see a resurgence in serious epidemics...

ULg, a mine of knowledge on resistant enzymes

Between 1995 and 2008, the Enzymology Laboratory at ULg’s Center for Protein Engineering co-ordinated three European research networks on metallo-beta-lactamases and became a  world leader in this domain. Among the numerous advances made, Jean-Marie Frère and his colleagues from Liège, in collaboration with other teams, discovered the mechanism of action of certain beta-lactamase inhibitors, among other things. They also studied the kinetic properties of these enzymes and characterised their activity spectra, purifying a very large number of them from pathogenic and non-pathogenic organisms. One of Professor Jean-Marie Frère’s proudest achievements is having been the first, alongside his colleagues his from Grenoble (and Liège), to determine the structure of a zinc beta-lactamase. “This work was a world first. Since then, we have observed that all the metallo-beta-lactamases – there are about 100 described so far, but you can bet that there will be more – have a similar structure, except for a small sub-family".  Jean-Marie Frère was involved in writing three of the book’s twenty chapters and other researchers from ULg helped to write seven of the other chapters. Hence, a work in which Liège’s know-how on resistance enzymes plays a major role!