UC San Diego finds sea compound that fights brain amoeba

A brain-eating amoeba kills more than 97% of the people it infects. It moves so fast that treatment often comes too late. Now UC San Diego scientists report a compound that kills the amoeba faster. Its name is rutamycin B, and it comes from a marine bacterium. In lab tests, it hit full strength in four hours. The standard drug took 16.

The disease is called primary amoebic meningoencephalitis. Current treatments are often too slow or too toxic. Rutamycin B shuts down an enzyme the amoeba needs to make energy. It was 200 to 300 times more lethal to the parasite than to human cells. That is what you want from a drug. Mixed with the standard drug, it worked at just 3% to 10% of its normal dose. These claims come from the university's own account of the study. The team, led by Anjan Debnath, William Fenical and Hayley Fong, published it in the journal Marine Drugs.

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Will it work inside a living body? That is the open question. The infection attacks the brain. So the compound would need to cross the blood-brain barrier. That is the tight filter that protects the brain from the bloodstream. The team plans to test that and to try it in live disease models. Until then, this is a promising lead, not a treatment.