A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria • Hacker News Board

Re: A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria

#21

Post by jlavine » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 2:18 PM UTC

tchaffee wrote: post #3

This 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.

There's at least a couple of studies [1][2] showing benefits of using a probiotic cleaner containing B. subtilis, B. pumilus and B. megaterium made by Belgian company Chrisal [3] over just using bleach for surfaces in a hospital setting. I first read about this in the book "I Contain Multitudes" which is about the microbiome.

From [1]: "This concept has been designated as biocontrol when the application is antagonistic towards a certain pathogen [26], and has already successfully been applied to the abatement of Legionella in water systems [27]."

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... [2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... [3] https://www.chrisal.com/about.php

Re: A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria

#22

Post by andreygrehov » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 4:59 PM UTC

xenadu02 wrote: post #17

andreygrehov wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy

People (in the west) have been writing about phage therapy and how revolutionary it will be for 20 years now. It still hasn't arrived. Phage therapy requires determining which bacteria is causing the disease, then having phages on-hand suitable for that specific bacteria (or some system to culture them). Using the "wrong" phages is useless and there are hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of strains. Bacteria al…

> Phage therapy requires determining which bacteria is causing the disease

That's exactly what they do in Eastern Europe. They work with each patient individually. Here is a good read [0].

> A few weeks later, the Georgian doctors called Rose with good news: They would be able to design a concoction of phages to treat Rachel’s infections. After convincing Rachel’s doctor to write a prescription for the viruses (so they could cross the U.S. border), Rose paid the Georgian clinic $800 for a three-month supply. She was surprised that phages were so inexpensive; in contrast, her insurance company was forking over roughly $14,000 a month for Rachel’s antibiotics.

[0] https://www.buzzfeed.com/azeenghorayshi/mail-order-viruses-a...

Re: A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria

#23

Post by DoreenMichele » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 5:18 PM UTC

I believe that subtle differences, called polymorphisms, in the DNA of host factor genes could explain why some individuals are more susceptible to pathogens than others.

Or not so subtle ones, like having cystic fibrosis.

an alternative approach called host-directed therapy (HDT), a suite of treatments whose goal is to enhance the host's own immune response rather than relying exclusively on antibacterial drugs.

I've been doing this for close to 18 years. Zahidul Alam is welcome to shoot me an email if he wants to talk about this stuff some time.

Some promising examples of HD include commonly used drugs for non-infectious diseases—verapamil and metformin, for example which modulate inflammation and increase host antimicrobial response to pathogens; cytokines, a group of proteins that include interleukins, that induce host pro-inflammatory cell signaling to kill pathogens; and nutritional products such as Vitamin D3, which augments the host’s cellular defenses.

A nutshell version of what I know:

Excess acidity promotes inflammation and that promotes the creation of biofilms. I've seen research indicating that if you reduce acidity, you can break up biofilm. Biofilm is a major factor in antibiotic resistance.

Second: Forget recommendations to take Vitamin D or Vitamin C or Zinc to treat a cold or whatever. Find out what nutrients you are short on and improve your nutritional status.

Third: Glycoproteins are structures composed of proteins and carbs. These play an important role in immune function. I found that getting the right carbs made a huge difference, probably because it's a building block for glycoproteins.

Fourth: Fasting. The gut is home to 70 to 80 percent of the immune cells in our bodies. My belief is that the food we eat is the single biggest source of income and, this digestion is the single biggest challenge to the immune system. Giving the immune system a day off can allow it to redirect resources elsewhere in the body.

Re: A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria

#24

Post by superbug_slayer » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 3:44 PM UTC

andreygrehov wrote: post #7

drenvuk wrote: post #2

I 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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy

I work in this area after curing my husband of a life-threatening superbug with IV phage therapy. That case has re-invigorated phage therapy in the West and there are several clinical trials that will start in 2019. Even if phage therapy isn't shown efficacious on its own, there is growing evidence of synergy between phage and antibiotics that itself is a game-changer. My husband and I wrote a book about our story which covers the strange history of phage therapy: ThePerfectPredator.com

Re: A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria

#25

Post by xenadu02 » Mon, Jan 07, 2019, 11:38 PM UTC

andreygrehov wrote: post #22

xenadu02 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People (in the west) have been writing about phage therapy and how revolutionary it will be for 20 years now. It still hasn't arrived. Phage therapy requires determining which bacteria is causing the disease, then having phages on-hand suitable for that specific bacteria (or some system to culture them). Using the "wrong" phages is useless and there are hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of strains. Bacteria al…

> Phage therapy requires determining which bacteria is causing the disease That's exactly what they do in Eastern Europe. They work with each patient individually. Here is a good read [0]. > A few weeks later, the Georgian doctors called Rose with good news: They would be able to design a concoction of phages to treat Rachel’s infections. After convincing Rachel’s doctor to write a prescription for the viruses (so th…

> A few weeks later

A huge number of infections would lead to death within a few weeks. Critical ones within days or hours.

I'm not saying we shouldn't explore phage therapy. I'm saying it isn't the magic bullet supporters have been promising for 20 years. It isn't like western medicine is ignoring phages, there are just a lot of issues to work out.