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Team Builds Viruses To Combat Harmful "Biofilms"
Scientists from MIT and Boston University are creating viruses that will wipe out "biofilms" that contain harmful bacteria on surfaces of the human body and industrial or medical devices. "Bacterial biofilms can form almost anywhere, even on your teeth if you don't brush for a day or two. When they accumulate in hard to reach places such as the insides of food processing machines or medical catheters, however, they become persistent sources of infection. These bacteria excrete a variety of proteins, polysaccharides, and nucleic acids that together with other accumulating materials form an extracellular matrix, or in Lu's words, a "slimy layer," that encases the bacteria. Traditional remedies such as antibiotics are not as effective on these bacterial biofilms as they are on free-floating bacteria. In some cases, antibiotics even encourage bacterial biofilms to form."
The whole point of preventing/stopping the films is in places where you can't reach where the films will accumulate. Like an artificial heart. I'd like to see you clean *that* in the shower every morning.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
The cellular targets on bacteria are very different than those for mammals. It's uncommon for viriuses to jump species. It's even more rare to jump to another phylum. Jumping kingdoms is practically miraculous.
The FDA has already approved bacteriophages to be used in a variety of settings, so there's probably a pretty good safety record.
You're partially correct. It's incomplete disinfection that poses the greatest risk, because the survivors are often those bugs best suited to survive repeated treatments. A clean sweep, however, solves the problem. By way of illustration, the rate of hospital-originating resistance Staph infections is much higher in the US than in Europe, where they test pretty much everyone for the bug on admittance and perform eradication procedures on anyone carrying it.
It would be silly to suggest that they add this anti-biofilm virus to, say, bath soap or dish detergeant, but in places like catheters and dialysis equipment where biofilm acts as a nigh-indestructible reservoir of infection it could be really useful.