Silver Makes Antibiotics Thousands of Times More Effective

The antimicrobial treatment could help to solve modern bacterial resistance

By Brian Owens and Nature magazine

(Image: Wikimedia Commons/Riraq25)

Like werewolves and vampires, bacteria have a weakness: silver. The precious metal has been used to fight infection for thousands of years — Hippocrates first described its antimicrobial properties in 400 bc — but how it works has been a mystery. Now, a team led by James Collins, a biomedical engineer at Boston University in Massachusetts, has described how silver can disrupt bacteria, and shown that the ancient treatment could help to deal with the thoroughly modern scourge of antibiotic resistance. The work is published today in Science Translational Medicine. 

Silver may help in the fight against drug-resistant bacteria such as Stenotrophomonas maltophilia by easing large antibiotic molecules through the microbes' outer coating.

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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=silver-makes-antibiotics-thousands-of-times-more-effective