DailyDirt: Killing Those Tiny Germs

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Thu, Oct 16th 2014 5:00pm — Michael Ho

The overuse of antibiotics may be leading us into the "post-antibiotic era" where we'll face numerous bacteria that are resistant to our most advanced drugs. We may need to develop different strategies for identifying antibiotics or try various phage therapies to fend off antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Here are just a few links on finding new antibiotics and using bacteriophages in medicine.

If we really met the end of antibiotics without any medicines to fight bacterial infections, it would be horrible. If you think Ebola is scary, just read up on MRSA and KPC-Oxa 48. [url]
Tweaking antibiotic drugs can still produce some variants that may extend the usefulness of these pharmaceuticals by several years. A chemically-modified vancomycin has been discovered with 10-100 times the potency of the native compound. [url]
The strategy of looking for new antibiotics in natural products has provided diminishing returns as researchers discovered they were finding the same compounds again and again, but new ways to genetically identify microbes could help refine the screening process and avoid redundant targets. Compiling a database of known genes could help identify potentially new antibiotics by highlighting the strains that might be more fruitful for novel drug targets. [url]
Viruses are not evil. Bacteriophages actually keep us healthy by infecting and killing off disease-causing bacteria. Phage therapy could be a viable alternative to using antibiotics, but using viruses to fight off infections is not a widely used procedure in Western medicine (yet). [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: antibiotics, bacteria, bacteriophages, biotech, drug discovery, health, kpc-oxa 48, medicine, microbes, mrsa, phage therapy, pharmaceuticals, superbugs, vancomycin, virus

4 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Mason Wheeler (profile), 16 Oct 2014 @ 5:16pm

Viruses are not evil. Bacteriophages actually keep us healthy by infecting and killing off disease-causing bacteria. Phage therapy could be a viable alternative to using antibiotics, but using viruses to fight off infections is not a widely used procedure in Western medicine (yet).

For some reason, the first thing I think of when I hear this is an old song, that sounds like a cautionary tale about just this kind of scenario...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Anonymous Coward, 16 Oct 2014 @ 6:10pm

I've always thought medical research should start focusing on nanotechnology. Bacteria can resist chemicals, but they couldn't resist tiny robots with tiny lasers.

So, which would be more accessible and/or less likely to cause the end of the world: phage therapy, or nano therapy?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
John Fenderson (profile), 17 Oct 2014 @ 8:36am

MRSA
One of the reasons that I'm not afraid of ebola is because of things like MRSA and KPC-Oxa. Those are real, serious threats that we have few, and declining, defenses against right now. Ebola is much easier to control and manage than those are. If I'm going to fear disease, ebola isn't even in my top 10. MRSA is in the top three.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Marvin (profile), 18 Oct 2014 @ 5:52am

Antibiotic resistance
Bacteria mutate quickly. I presented with a specific antibiotic, bacterial mutations that are resistant to that antibiotic are favored. and you get antibiotic resistant bacteria that are favored. However, in the absence of those specific antibiotics the bacteria without extraneous functions (such as antibiotic resistance structural alterations) will be out-competed by non-resistant bacteria. The solution here is to take certain types of antibiotics out of circulation for a period, say 5 years and reintroduce them. If this is done cyclically then we will have ways to counter "resistant" bacteria.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]