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New bacteria, and two potential antibiotics, discovered in soil

rockefeller.edu

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Re: New bacteria, and two potential antibiotics, discovered in soil

#51

Post by fsckboy »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #43
mrbonner wrote: post #19

Turns out the old saying, "Let the kids play and eat dirt," might’ve been right all along—who knew? All this time, they might've been giving themselves tiny doses of natural antibacterials without even realizing it.

> Turns out the old saying, "Let the kids play and eat dirt," might’ve been right all along—who knew? Everyone? That's not an unusual position by any means. It's known as the Hygiene Hypothesis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis

while everybody is correcting everybody, let's point out that the Hygiene Hypothesis is not called the Hygiene Theory, and the hygiene theories we have generally say to keep things clean.

Re: New bacteria, and two potential antibiotics, discovered in soil

#52

Post by malfist »

nicman23 wrote: post #45
throw10920 wrote: post #42

It's great that we may have two new antibiotics! Now, it'd be nice to keep those for as long as possible. Is regulation on the use of these feasible? I'd think that if your law just restricts its use on animals (which I believe is where the majority of antibiotic-resistance comes from) that would be easier to pass than if you tried to restrict its use on humans, but I don't know if there's precedent for it.

antibios are rotated in and out until wild strains are vulnerable again

That isn't how it works. Bacteria don't lose resistance over time, that's not how evolution works. A selective pressure was applied to evolve bacteria with resistance, unless there's evolutionarily pressure to lose that evolution, it doesn't get lost

Re: New bacteria, and two potential antibiotics, discovered in soil

#53

Post by pjc50 »

fgfarben wrote: post #13
kragen wrote: post #11

Newly discovered potential antibiotics are actually pretty common, and they would be critical to solving the antibiotic-resistance menace. But no major new families of antibiotics have been brought to market since about 01962, although a dozen or so families were discovered over the previous 20 years. (Or, maybe one new family was.) That was when drug regulation changed dramatically in the US with https://en.wikipedi…

My pet idea is that Western societies should prescribe antibiotics at random to a different tiny fraction of the elderly population each month / year. People who suffer from unexplained / untreatable diseases like arthritis or MS might get some relief, while there would be an added pressure on the pharma industry to innovate in antibiotic development by accelerating the loss of existing antibiotic efficacy through th…

> accelerating the loss of existing antibiotic efficacy through the evolution of resistance

This is another one of those schemes for getting a bunch of people killed in the service of medical crankery, isn't it.

Re: New bacteria, and two potential antibiotics, discovered in soil

#54

Post by wolfram74 »

m101 wrote: post #50

Is there any reason to believe that antibiotic resistance is a problem given the potential for new ones and the rotation of existing ones?

It has some elements of standard tragedy of the commons, suppose nearly everybody is following the same rotation scheme, and holding some antibiotics out of rotation entirely as emergency last resort type of deal. Anybody who isn't playing along can be quite confident they're the only person using the emergency drugs and that they'll work quite well.

Re: New bacteria, and two potential antibiotics, discovered in soil

#56

Post by glenstein »

malfist wrote: post #52
nicman23 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

antibios are rotated in and out until wild strains are vulnerable again

That isn't how it works. Bacteria don't lose resistance over time, that's not how evolution works. A selective pressure was applied to evolve bacteria with resistance, unless there's evolutionarily pressure to lose that evolution, it doesn't get lost

But there is evolutionary pressure to lose traits over time. Loss of traits over time is fundamental in evolution. Resistance carries fitness and metabolic costs and evolution is always looking to squeeze out certain traits if they're no longer integral to survival. Moles losing eyesight, flightless birds losing fight musculature and hollow bones once they shifted to new strategies, humans losing the ability to synthesize our own vitamin C when we could get it from a diversified diet.

There's also now strong documented history of bacteria losing resistances over time hence the rotating strategy. Granted, some resistances are "cheap" to maintain and not lost, or recirculated in the wild and it's not a panacaea (it's more a hypothesized strategy than a realized one and it hasn't solved the issue), but it's by no means a failure to understand evolutionary principles.

Re: New bacteria, and two potential antibiotics, discovered in soil

#57

Post by lakhim »

kragen wrote: post #26
liquid_thyme wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The problem was that it wasn't more effective than the existing standard of care; it was only equally effective. That is misleading. When a clinical trial is designed for non-inferiority, it doesn't say anything about being superior or equal. Just as legally, a defendant is either guilty or not guilty - there is no legal adjudication of being "innocent". These drugs are not comparable (different stability profiles,…

" There is no evidence that safety regulations have denied us some miracle drug. " Well, of course we don't know of a specific miracle drug they've denied us, because it isn't until after a drug is in wide use that you find out whether it's a miracle drug or not. But we can see that there were enormous numbers of miracle drugs in the 20 years immediately preceding the safety regulations, and almost none in the 63 yea…

you're missing literally every biological, most antivirals, and the statins, and that's just off the top of my head.

Re: New bacteria, and two potential antibiotics, discovered in soil

#58

Post by glenstein »

ycombinete wrote: post #46
nicman23 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

antibios are rotated in and out until wild strains are vulnerable again

I have never heard about this before. Good news if true. Antibiotics seem to be a bit of a Tragedy of the Commons situation though; my intuition is that people should do this but probably won't.

It's barely begun to get off the ground and it's by no means solved the issue of antibiotic resistance, but it's a cause for hope. There's other grounds for excitement too, like deriving new antibiotics from naturally occurring microbes (its how the originals were found but then we rode those coattails for decades without searching for new ones). Also phage therapy, CRISPR based strategies, and microbiome management.

Not solved, but it makes antibiotic resistance look more like our generations Killer Bees.

Re: New bacteria, and two potential antibiotics, discovered in soil

#59

Post by kragen »

lakhim wrote: post #57
kragen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" There is no evidence that safety regulations have denied us some miracle drug. " Well, of course we don't know of a specific miracle drug they've denied us, because it isn't until after a drug is in wide use that you find out whether it's a miracle drug or not. But we can see that there were enormous numbers of miracle drugs in the 20 years immediately preceding the safety regulations, and almost none in the 63 yea…

you're missing literally every biological, most antivirals, and the statins, and that's just off the top of my head.

I wouldn't say I'm missing them, Bob.

Maybe you disagree, but I don't think infliximab or even rituximab is close to the same level of importance as things like penicillin, Thorazine, misoprostol, or oral rehydration therapy. Insulin is, and it's technically a biological, but it was pre-01962.

I listed the three antivirals I think were revolutionary rather than evolutionary (all of which were post-01962), and I did list lovastatin, which was the first statin available, and widely applicable, and therefore the revolutionary one.

Re: New bacteria, and two potential antibiotics, discovered in soil

#60

Post by PaulHoule »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #44
PaulHoule wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you don't know they are there doesn't mean they aren't there!

It's like you've never heard that what you don't know can't hurt you.

Or help you. (e.g. play some important role in the wider ecosystem)
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