DailyDirt: Good Drugs Everywhere

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Concern over antibiotic resistance seems to be steadily growing, but some folks are optimistic that science will be able to develop new drugs or other kinds of medicines to replace older, increasingly ineffectual, pharmaceuticals that target the microbes in our bodies. Considering that scientists have only recently started to study the human microbiome, it's possible that medicine could find a whole new categories of treatments that are yet undiscovered. Here are just a few links on finding drugs all around us.

• If you've got dirt, there might be some naturally-occurring microbes in your soil that would be useful for producing novel antibiotics or other drugs. Citizen scientists can help collect samples from all over the US, and your backyard soil could be considered a "poor man's rainforest" when it comes to biodiversity. [url]
• Big pharma hasn't even scratched the surface of the possible, potential medicines that could be made. It's estimated that 1 novemdecillion "small molecule" compounds could be biologically active, and scientists have synthesized an extremely small fraction of them. [url]
• Several studies have found pharmaceuticals are turning up in drinking water treatment plants. The concentrations are typically very low, in the nanograms per liter range, but those concentrations could still have an effect on wildlife. These concentrations could also build up over time if the drugs are persistent in the environment. [url]

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

Filed Under: antibiotic resistance, chemistry, compounds, drinking water, drugs, health, medicine, microbiome, pharmaceuticals, soil