Vegan honey with added methylglyoxal and peroxide-generating enzymes killed M. abscessus in culture

The design is easy to follow. The base is a sugar syrup that matches honey's consistency, sugars and taste and contains nothing from bees ^[3]. Into it the team put two components of mānuka honey that proved particularly effective, methylglyoxal (MGO) and hydrogen peroxide ^[7]. The best formulations paired MGO with enzyme systems that generate the peroxide inside the honey, and those formulations could kill the bacterium ^[8].

The target was chosen with care. Mycobacterium abscessus is highly drug-resistant and causes difficult-to-treat lung, skin and soft tissue infections, and new treatment options are urgently needed ^[5]. Cox's group had already shown that mānuka honey is active against it ^[5]. The team tested the vegan formulations against a culture of the bacterium and scored two things: whether growth stopped, and whether bacteria died ^[6].

A formulation that holds growth in check is a weaker result than one that clears the culture, and according to the report only the best formulations did the latter ^[8].

Mānuka honey is costly, and because it is a natural product, one batch can differ from the next ^[4]. Dr. Jonathan Cox, who is a senior biosciences lecturer at Aston, set out to see whether its key antimicrobial components could be recreated in a fully vegan, synthetic formulation ^[9]. The case for a cheaper, more consistent product follows from that framing. The phys.org summary of the study does not give what the added MGO and enzymes cost, how steady the activity is from batch to batch, or at what concentrations the killing happened.

Cox's own claim for the work is measured. "Longer term, this research could help support the development of sustainable honey-inspired antimicrobial products for wound care or other topical applications, without relying on bee-derived ingredients," Cox said ^[11]. In our view, skin and soft tissue infections are the realistic fit for a topical product, since the same bacterium also causes lung infections ^[5] that a wound dressing would not reach.

We think the result is a sound proof of concept for one narrow point: some of the antimicrobial properties of medical honey can potentially be reproduced without bee-derived products ^[12]. It holds for one species in a culture. Cox said the next steps are to optimize the formulations and to understand how the different antimicrobial components work together, and he suggested that later work could test the formulations against other clinically important disease-causing bacteria ^[10].