A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria
blogs.scientificamerican.com
A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria
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Re: A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria
#2I love this. Previously there was a story about using viruses in order to combat drug resistant bacteria[0]. The more tools we have to kill them off, the better. It's only tangentially related but my feeling is that we've barely scraped what's possible with viral, bacterial and protein engineering though. I can't wait until we start treating them much like we treat transistors and circuits. The building blocks are even nearly the same size at this point.
[0]https://mashable.com/2018/03/11/bacteriophage-viruses-from-p...
Re: A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria
#3This approach is encouraging. I would also like to see more research with the opposite of antibiotics: probiotics. Which doesn't need to mean yogurt. I'm talking about something similar to the approach recently used with mosquitoes where infertile males were bred and released, hugely reducing the population. That type of thinking.
Re: A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria
#4This approach is encouraging. I would also like to see more research with the opposite of antibiotics: probiotics. Which doesn't need to mean yogurt. I'm talking about something similar to the approach recently used with mosquitoes where infertile males were bred and released, hugely reducing the population. That type of thinking.
Tricky though, given that bacteria reproduce asexually[1]. However it might be possible to use horizontal gene transfer to do something similar.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteria#Growth_and_reproducti...
Re: A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria
#5It's shocking to me that half of the soap for sale at the grocery store is antibacterial. This should be illegal.
Re: A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria
#6It's shocking to me that half of the soap for sale at the grocery store is antibacterial. This should be illegal.
Note that in the US at least it no longer contains antibiotics like Triclosan[1]. Plenty of less-likely-to-create-resistance compounds are commonly used now, like acetic or lactic acid.
1: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/09/02/4923947...
Re: A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria
#7I love this. Previously there was a story about using viruses in order to combat drug resistant bacteria[0]. The more tools we have to kill them off, the better. It's only tangentially related but my feeling is that we've barely scraped what's possible with viral, bacterial and protein engineering though. I can't wait until we start treating them much like we treat transistors and circuits. The building blocks are ev…
Came here to write about this. Phage therapy[0] is an extremely interesting topic and there are a number of startups working in this direction. It's funny, but in Eastern Europe (Georgia, Russia, Poland, etc.) phage therapy is used broadly for many years, whereas US is just catching up.
Re: A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria
#8Can anyone complete the last sentence in this paragraph, I'm very intrigued what its actually attempting to refer to
> HDT also aims to balance host reactivity at the site of infection by reducing or preventing an excessive inflammatory response, which can damage internal organs and can even kill. This is achieved through cellular therapy, in which a specific population of bone marrow cells is injected in a host’s body, reducing and preventing tissue.
Preventing tissue what??
Re: A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria
#9Can anyone complete the last sentence in this paragraph, I'm very intrigued what its actually attempting to refer to > HDT also aims to balance host reactivity at the site of infection by reducing or preventing an excessive inflammatory response, which can damage internal organs and can even kill. This is achieved through cellular therapy, in which a specific population of bone marrow cells is injected in a host’s bo…
I assumed preventing tissue inflammation
Re: A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria
#10The human body is truly incredible, and the immune system in particular. Each of us has a custom designed garbage collection system tailored for our bodies. I predict the next big leaps in medicine will come from empowering and leveraging that system to fight everything from infection to cancer.