Scottish scientists yesterday reported a breakthrough which could bring revolutionary new treatments for superbugs and cancer within the next decade.

Scottish scientists yesterday reported a breakthrough which could bring revolutionary new treatments for superbugs and cancer within the next decade.

Experts at St Andrews and Aberdeen universities have identified a key mechanism which superbugs such as C Diff and MRSA need to survive, paving the way towards targeting the crucial survival process with specially designed drugs.

The mechanism involves tiny channels in bacterial walls which operate like the valve on a pressure cooker, opening and closing to maintain the right balance of force to keep the bugs alive.

Now that it has been discovered, researchers can move forward to develop drugs to keep the channels open or closed in order to kill off the superbugs.

The team believe that new drugs for people who have contracted the bugs could be available in the next 10 years.

Within five years the development could also be used to design new cleaning chemicals to wipe out bugs lurking in hospital wards. There is also the potential for the findings to lead to new cancer treatments.

Professor Ian Booth, who led the Aberdeen team and Professor James Naismith, leader of the team at St Andrews, published the study last night in the journal Science.

Professor Booth said: "Channels in bacteria perform absolutely key roles in cell survival. We have been able to show how this channel opens and closes. Understanding how they work will play a major role in inhibiting the survival of bacteria and could have applications as basic as cleansing hospital equipment and wards or helping to make food safer.

"These channels are found in MRSA and C Diff and this knowledge has not yet been exploited. The future path is to find new chemicals and processes that exploit the importance of the channels to these bacteria."

He added: "This is not a magic bullet, it is about giving clinicians a new armoury.

A completely new finding like this could take 10 years to reach the pharmacy shelf because of the time it takes to conduct clinical trials.

"A hygiene chemical for cleaning hospital wards could take three to five years. We are looking for industrial partners who would be interested in sponsorship."

Professor Naismith said: "New chemicals designed to force channels to stay open or shut are likely to kill or at the very least, greatly slow down the growth of bacteria. Slowing down the growth gives the body's defences time to tackle its bacterial invader."

The fidings are the culmination of 15 years of research involving both universities supported by bodies including the Scottish Funding Council and the Medical Research Council. It was also funded by the Wellcome Trust which gave £1.5m for the "groundbreaking" work.

'I've lost a couple of toes; I'm lucky it wasn't my life'

Richard Stern has already lost two toes and is in danger of losing a third after contracting the superbug MRSA 10 years ago.

The 65-year-old Glasgow company director believes he picked up the bug while at one of the city's hospitals for treatment relating to a condition which he also developed during medical intervention.

That condition, called arachnoiditis, rendered him partially paralysed after it took hold in the 1970s when he underwent a precursor of today's MRI scan using a now-banned hazardous dye.

The combined damage he says he has suffered through the NHS has left him walking with calipers and forced him to work part-time. There is, says Mr Stern, "nothing" that can stop the arachnoiditis from slowly spreading until it kills him.

Aside from a variety of dressings aimed at saving the latest endangered toe, there has been little chance of successfully treating the superbug either.

"Last year the MRSA got so bad I could only take one or two antibiotics. They were very toxic and I took an allergic reaction to them and had to go into hospital to have them given intravenously," he said.

"I have already lost a couple of toes, and I have been lucky I haven't lost my life. But trying to keep it at bay is so difficult because once it's got a hold of you it's got a hold of you."

He was pleased to hear that Scottish scientists have made a breakthrough that could lead to new treatments for MRSA, both in patients and in hospital wards.

"Any development is good," said Mr Stern. "Anything that can help is welcome. The situation is dire. There has been overuse of antibiotics making the drugs useless as bugs developed resistance and poor hygiene in hospitals."