Antibiotic resistance, a mounting crisis in global health, emerges when bacteria evolve to survive treatments meant to eliminate them. This makes once-manageable infections difficult — and sometimes impossible — to treat. The overuse and misuse of antibiotics in healthcare and agriculture have accelerated this evolution, allowing resistant strains to thrive, spread, and share their survival traits with other bacteria.

According to the World Health Organization, resistant pathogens like Acinetobacter baumannii and Pseudomonas aeruginosa — which cause severe infections in vulnerable patients — are now among the most dangerous. In 2019 alone, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) claimed 1.27 million lives, with nearly 5 million deaths associated with drug-resistant infections.

"In exciting work led by our team, we've identified a novel antimicrobial — saccharin," Ronan McCarthy, lead researcher at Brunel University of London's Antimicrobial Innovations Center, told phys.org. "Saccharin breaks the walls of bacterial pathogens, causing them to distort and eventually burst, killing the bacteria. Crucially, this damage lets antibiotics slip inside, overwhelming their resistance systems."

The findings, published in EMBO Molecular Medicine, show saccharin halts bacterial growth, disrupts DNA replication, and prevents the formation of protective biofilms that shield bacteria from antibiotics. Researchers even developed a saccharin-infused wound dressing that outperformed top silver-based dressings used in hospitals.

"This is very exciting," McCarthy added. "Normally it takes billions of dollars and decades to develop a new antibiotic. But here we have a compound that's already widely used, and it not only kills drug-resistant bacteria but also makes existing antibiotics more effective. Artificial sweeteners are found in many diet and sugar-free foods. We discovered that the same sweeteners you have with your coffee or in a 'sugar-free' drink could make some of the world's most dangerous bacteria easier to treat."

As global health leaders warn of a looming “post-antibiotic era,” this unexpected use of a century-old sweetener could be a pivotal step toward reclaiming ground in the battle against resistant infections.

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