Question: There is a very recent drug called Staphefekt, that treats superbugs, but is based on a naturally occurring enzyme produced by viruses and attacks infections differently to antibiotics. It does not destroy harmless bacteria from the body. In a study, the drug was proven to eliminate MRSA in five out of six patients with skin infections. Do you think drugs like this can replace antibiotics effectively in some instances? @SWBGS

Robert Hampson answered on 11 Nov 2014:

Staphefekt is indeed very new and has been used in skin infections in the clinic.

Ezymes specifically have some problems when being used as drugs. Enzymes are generally long proteins, if you take them orally (you eat them), then your digestive system will destroy them. If you have them by injection, then large foreign proteins are floating around your blood stream, because of their size they can trigger an immune response causing an allergy much more easily than smaller molecules, they are also often targeted by various things in the blood for digestion. Also, it is very expensive to make enzyme based drugs as they are often too large to synthesise with normal chemistry. Instead they are often made using bacteria themselves an then isolated from a mixture of the products they produce. Although we are getting considerably better at this it is still much less efficient than traditional chemistry.

So…
1) Higher risk of allergy
2) Need more molecule to overcome excretion and digestion
3) Expensive to make a lot of molecule

Neither problem 1 or 2 of these apply to topical (skin) application which is why Staphefekt has been shown to be successful there first.

For every 50-100 molecule that shows initial promise in early clinical settings maybe 5-10 may reach later stage clinical trials, maybe only 2 or 3 will actually become drugs.

I am happy that new molecules are going to clinical trials but I won’t get my hopes up yet!