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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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.