A pre-clinical study demonstrated that piperacillin, an FDA-approved antibiotic, that inhibits peptidoglycan production, could be a more effective treatment for Lyme disease than doxycycline, the current standard treatment.1

This could be a potentially promising development since doxycycline is not effective in up to 20% of patients.1

"Piperacillin may be a game-changer for improving Lyme disease treatment, which is currently a challenge for researchers and physicians. Furthermore, our new mechanistic understanding of how piperacillin affects peptidoglycan synthesis is unexpectedly informing our development of a biomarker-based approach to diagnose acute Lyme disease," Brandon Jutras, PhD, associate professor of Microbiology-Immunology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said in a statement.1

For this study, Investigators screened nearly 500 FDA-approved compounds to identify potential treatments for Lyme disease. Piperacillin stood out in laboratory studies with mice, effectively killing the Lyme-causing bacterium, Borrelia burgdorferi, at very low concentrations by targeting its unique peptidoglycan cell-wall pattern. Piperacillin cured infection at doses 100 times lower than doxycycline.