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From a Pile of Dirt, Hope for a Powerful New Antibiotic
Posted on 1/8/15 at 6:37 am
Posted on 1/8/15 at 6:37 am
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/08/health/from-a-pile-of-dirt-hope-for-a-powerful-new-antibiotic.html
quote:
Excerpted as follows ...
An unusual method for producing antibiotics may help solve an urgent global problem: the rise in infections that resist treatment with commonly used drugs, and the lack of new antibiotics to replace ones that no longer work.
The method, which extracts drugs from bacteria that live in dirt, has yielded a powerful new antibiotic, researchers reported in the journal Nature on Wednesday. The new drug, teixobactin, was tested in mice and easily cured severe infections, with no side effects.
Better still, the researchers said, the drug works in a way that makes it very unlikely that bacteria will become resistant to it. And the method developed to produce the drug has the potential to unlock a trove of natural compounds to fight infections and cancer — molecules that were previously beyond scientists’ reach because the microbes that produce them could not be grown in the laboratory.
Teixobactin has not yet been tested in humans, so its safety and effectiveness are not known. Studies in people will not begin for about two years, according to Kim Lewis, the senior author of the article and director of the Antimicrobial Discovery Center at Northeastern University in Boston. Those studies will take several years, so even if the drug passes all the required tests, it still will not be available for five or six years, he said during a telephone news conference on Tuesday. If it is approved, he said, it will probably have to be injected, not taken by mouth.
Experts not involved with the research said the technique for isolating the drug had great potential. They also said teixobactin looked promising, but expressed caution because it has not yet been tested in humans.
Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University, called the research “ingenious” and said, “We’re in desperate need of some good antibiotic news.”
Regarding teixobactin, he said: “It’s at the test-tube and the mouse level, and mice are not men or women, and so moving beyond that is a large step, and many compounds have failed.” He added, “Toxicity is often the Achilles’ heel of drugs.”
Continued ... LINK
Posted on 1/8/15 at 9:40 am to scrooster
quote:
Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University
Dores doin work!
Posted on 1/8/15 at 9:48 am to scrooster
We have become God. Amazing we can create medicine from dirt. Later we'll make something prettier but not as useful from the medicine
Posted on 1/8/15 at 9:50 am to scrooster
So, dad was right. "Just rub some dirt on it".
Posted on 1/8/15 at 9:50 am to scrooster
I heard about this on NPR yesterday. Good stuff.
Posted on 1/8/15 at 10:41 am to scrooster
I don't understand why we are so concerned with infection in mice? They don't live very long and they're fairly cheap to replace. It seems these scientist should refocus their efforts on something we could all use, like fax machines that never run out of paper or something like that.
Posted on 1/8/15 at 12:34 pm to cokebottleag
quote:
So, dad was right. "Just rub some dirt on it".
Listen ... there is more to the old wive's remedies than modern medicine has been willing to admit for over a century now.
Poultices worked for 1000s of years. The problems that required antibiotics were plagues and wars.
Posted on 1/8/15 at 12:48 pm to scrooster
Cancer is my worst fricking fear. I like that we can beat it sometimes but I can't wait until we discover a way to shut it down completely. frick cancer
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