Are the antibiotics of the future in cockroach guts?

That, as I understand it, is the claim made in this story posted September 7 by Katie Drummond on AOL News.

The sad truth is that wee beasties that once were completely vanquished by antibiotics have adapted and are no longer so well controlled. Scary acronyms like MRSA have crept into the common vocabulary. The once futuristic-sounding word "penicillin" has taken on a rather quaint, lace doily, cloth-wrapped-electrical-cord tone.

Researchers are looking with growing desperation at any possible replacements for increasingly obsolete antibiotics. The operative word here is "any." Thus, brave British researchers at the University of Nottingham's School of Veterinary Medicine and Science have been reduced to probing into the interiors of everyone's least favorite insects.

And yet it turns out that this seeming longest of long shots may yield miraculous returns. Writes Drummond:

[P]otent chemicals, found in the brain and central nervous tissues of the critters, are able to kill 90 percent of E. coli and MRSA in lab-based tests.

According to the researchers, the unsanitary and unhygenic environments in which these bugs flourish has spurred them to develop toxins against the bacteria that we can no longer kill on our own.

If scientists can really develop something from cockroach innards, though, there will have to be some rather heroic efforts from somebody's marketing department before the potentially life-saving advantages of cockroach-gut medicine can really catch on.