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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."
We already have stuff to combat this. For the human body, they're called "showers" or more broadly "hygiene". For medical instruments, they're called "autoclaves". None of which introduces foreign living biologics to the body.
We exist in a symbiotic relationship with a heck of a lot of bacteria. Attacking biofilms indiscriminately may have serious negative consequences. Hopefully there will be a lot of study before these are released into the environment.
Excellent news. Now all we need is version 2.0 which is capable of removing slimey pockets of underperforming IT management.
The fact that the people at MIT aren't idiots and can design a virus that targets bacteria, and not the massively different mammalian cells?
That's really no problem. We'll develop a fast-growing strain of wheat that we can use to make huge amounts of bread in order to develop molds that can be modified to feast on the virus.
Of course, this strain of wheat may grow too fast to be manageable, but that's really no problem. We'll just release hordes of pigeons to eat the excess grain. When the pigeons get too numerous, we'll release lizards that will eat the pigeons' eggs, thus controlling the population. To control the lizards, we'll release waves and waves of Chinese needle snakes to wipe them out. Of course, the snakes are even worse than the lizards, so we'll line up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat. Then, when wintertime rolls around, the gorillas will simply freeze to death.
As you can see, it's quite an elegant solution.
Instead of killing off biofilms, it would be much more interesting to teach them to calcify their protein matrices either within a mold or by guided deposition to form structures useful to humans. Hello, organic technology. How cool would it be to open a pan of biofilm, pour a couple gallons of milk on it, and grow yourself a new laptop?
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
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.
There's nothing to stop them from accumulating, but after the original bacteria are dead, the phages lose the ability to reproduce as like with a virus they can only reproduce by utilizing essential parts of a host cell.
As for the danger part, the only way they could ever cause a problem to humans is if they were to somehow kill off helpful bacteria, doing so in such an efficient manner that there were none left at all. And that won't happen, even when scientists want to kill an entire colony of bacteria down to the last one, it doesn't happen.
Bacteriophages are completely unable to infect a human as they are unable to cope with any form of DNA which isn't ring shaped. If human DNA were to become ring shaped we would have much larger problems on our hands.
The technique is safe, the bigger issue is getting approval of this sort of thing for use in the US. Currently, the only use that is near is the use of phages to keep down ecoli in beef down to a minimum.
I understand your point but you cant' help but think this thing could be one mutation away from attacking say good bacteria cultures. Thats still my biggest fear with respect to genetic modification is that we still don't understand the ecology of micro organisms in its entirety.
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.
There are companies and scientists trying to get us worried about disinfection 100% of the time. I can imagine the ads zooming on our skin and little CGI critters talk about how they're ready to strike.
Your answer sounds to me very much like knee-jerk reaction derived from watching too much environmentalist propaganda ("ZOMG antibiotics are killing us!!!1"). Sarcasm aside, I assume you didn't RTFA or even TFSummary:
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.
This isn't about snake oil, you know. In the first place, it was developed by MIT. In the second place, they're working to solve an already existing problem: Persistent sources of infection. People CAN DIE if they eat contaminated food that comes from an unclean processing machine, just as patients can die from an infection if the doctors use an unclean catheter. If the MIT researchers can get rid of 99.997% of the bacteria in this stuff, hospitals around the world will be very glad at the invention.
Scientists don't want to sell us anything. Scientists do science and research, and publish the results. In case you're wondering, we got this link from ScienceDaily, not FOX news or CNN.
So, when you say "There are companies and scientists trying to get us worried about disinfection", you should really say "There are companies trying to get us worried". Do you want to protest against companies trying to sell us their ultra-effective antibacterial soaps? Fine by me, but don't generalize and start accusing scientists.
And BTW, NOWHERE in the article is mentioned about disinfecting yourself 100% of the time. Where did you get that idea, anyway?
He probably got it from all the commercials trying to get you to disinfect yourself all the time. Sure, these guys are just scientists doing pure science, but if it's widely approved, do you really think that no company that makes it's living off selling "anti-bacterial" junk will decide to market this as the "100% effective bacteria killing wonder!" Then the stuff will be everywhere, and the odds of some bad mutation cropping up will be significantly higher.
And just because it's developed at MIT doesn't mean anything, and it certainly doesn't have any bearing on whether or not it's a good idea to start with.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Biofilms are the bane of my brew. However, this is really not needed because the current sanitizing agents work well enough to eliminate bacteria.
My concern is that using a virus to disrupt biofilms will have much more undesirable side effects than the simple chemicals being used already. For example, I want to kill bacteria, but allow yeast to grow afterward. If I treat a fermenter with this virus, can I be sure that it won't affect the yeast in some way? I can be sure that rinsing will dilute the sanitizer enough so that it isn't a problem, but could one say the same thing of a virus? Probably not.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Virii don't die. According to some definitions, they aren't even alive.
You too are partially correct. 'Search and destroy' missions are effective at eradicating one particular bad actor - MRSA. However it does not prevent Staph infections in general since we are all swimming in a sea of Staph and Strep. So you can still get cellulitis and Staph pneumonia - however, you can treat it with rocephin instead of vancomycin (or doxycyclin, bactrim, clindamycin, macrodantin, and other antibiotics to which MRSA is still sensitive.) However 'search and destroy' does not eradicate all resistant bacteria. For example VRE (vancomycin resistant enterococcus) is more prevalent in Europe largely because there is a high rate of community carriage because glycopeptide avoparcin is used to promote livestock in Europe (but not in the US where community VRE is essentially unheard of) and promotes high levels of VRE.
As a physician VRE scares the snot out of me more than MRSA. I treat patients with community acquired MRSA infections all the time - with oral antibiotics as outpatients. VRE is often a ticket to the ICU if not the ECU (Eternal Care Unit.)
Moreover, while 'search and destroy' does definitely save some patients from serious illness or even death, it also likely causes serious illness or even death in those pariahs who are isolated. There is pretty good evidence that patients who are on contact or respiratory isolation get poorer quality care when hospitalized. You get less face time with the staff, are less likely to get needed procedures and tests, and are more likely to be discharged earlier from the hospital when corrected for level of severity of illness. In addition those 'profiled' for possible infection are often the sickest in the hospital anyway (dialysis patients, AIDS patients, transplant recipients, cancer patients.) So the cure in this case may be worse than the disease.
That's not to say that both the US and Europe could do better than we are. I think a modified version of 'search and destroy' would benefit the US. However its not as simple as simply adopting one particular technique to decrease the prevalence of one particular bug. We need a comprehensive plan of attack against antibiotic resistance that is the Infectious Disease version of the Kyoto Protocol. It needs to involve comprehensive surveillance, R&D into best practices for infection control (lets start with a head to head of 'search and destroy' that doesn't just measure success by lower rates of MRSA infection, but in overall morbidity and mortality), monetary support for the implementation of such practices, immediate cessation of all antibiotics in agriculture, and R&D into the development of new classes of antibiotics (and cool stuff like TFA talked about.)
Nick
A plan we had to treat wastewater with an RO unit failed only because some sulfate-reducing bacteria kept fouling the membranes. Six days and they were completely slimed. So a slimer killing virus sounds like a great idea. And safer than crossing proton streams too :-)
This should also be very useful for seawater RO units. At least there is a potential for a better method of slime control.
Hope it works!