SYDNEY, Jan. 20 (Xinhua) -- A component of the narcotic plant, cannabis has been shown to kill bacteria such as those responsible for gonorrhoea, meningitis and legionnaires disease, according to a study released Wednesday by Australia's University of Queensland.
Following the world-first result, the study team said they are hopeful it could lead to the first new class of antibiotics for resistant bacteria in 60 years.
Associate Professor Mark Blaskovich from UQ's Institute for Molecular Bioscience explained it was the main nonpsychoactive component of cannabis, CBD, that can penetrate and kill a wide range of bacteria, including Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which causes gonorrhoea.
Gonorrhoea is a common sexually-transmitted infection which if left untreated can cause infertility, however due to the bacteria's highly adaptable nature there is no longer a single reliable antibiotic to treat it.
"This is the first time CBD has been shown to kill some types of Gram-negative bacteria," Blaskovich said.
The study also showed that CBD was effective against a much larger number of Gram-positive bacteria than previously known, including antibiotic-resistant pathogens such as MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) or "golden staph".
"These bacteria have an extra outer membrane, an additional line of defence that makes it harder for antibiotics to penetrate," Blaskovich explained.
"We think that cannabidiol kills bacteria by bursting their outer cell membranes, but we don't know yet exactly how it does that, and need to do further research."
The team also discovered that chemical analogs, created by slightly changing CBD's molecular structure, were also effective against the bacteria.
"This is particularly exciting because there have been no new molecular classes of antibiotics for Gram-negative infections discovered and approved since the 1960s, and we can now consider designing new analogs of CBD within improved properties," Blaskovich said. Enditem