Could Axolotls Help Heal Humans?

Have you ever heard of an axolotl? These tailed amphibians are known for their ability to regrow limbs, organs, and even parts of the brain!

Now scientists are trying to unlock the genetic secrets of these little creatures. Axolotls have a mucous membrane, and the antimicrobial peptides (AMP) in that mucous membrane protect an axolotl from pathogens. Biologists believe these AMPs could hold some solutions to antibiotic resistance and fighting cancer cells.

Antibiotics are essential in medicine, but health care professionals are concerned about the increasing resistance of bacteria to antibiotics. Scientists hope these AMPs might be an alternative to antibiotics in the future.

For the study, the axolotls were gently massaged by researchers wearing sterile gloves. After the axolotls produced skin mucus, the scientists scraped the mucus off their gloves. The team then narrowed down the most likely effective peptide candidates out of thousands that were extracted from the mucus.

“This is time-consuming and expensive, but unfortunately AMPs are not as easy to produce in microorganisms as some antibiotics,” said study co-author Dr. Peter M. Vogt, a surgeon and Clinic Director at the Kerstin Reimers Laboratory for Regenerative Biology at the Clinic for Plastic, Aesthetic, Hand and Reconstructive Surgery at Hannover Medical School in Germany.

The chemical structure and how peptides actually work is what makes the AMPs so challenging to produce. However, according to study co-author and Hannover Medical School biologist Sarah Strauß, that special chemical structure could also be what makes the AMPs so effective.

“We observed that the peptides specifically kill cancer cells without attacking healthy breast tissue cells,” said Dr. Strauß. “Overall, our results suggest that these identified AMPs could be promising candidates for combating antibiotic resistance and for anti-cancer strategies.”

While axolotls are threatened with extinction in the wild, all the axolotls in this study came from captive breeding and were treated within the guidelines of the German Animal Welfare Act. The results from this experiment were recently published in the journal PLOS One, though the scientists say more research is needed.