Alligator Blood May Be Source of New Antibiotics

esocid writes "Biochemists from McNeese State University have described how proteins in gator blood may provide a source of powerful new antibiotics to help fight infections associated with diabetic ulcers and severe burns. This new class of drug could also crack so-called 'superbugs' that are resistant to conventional medication. Previous studies have showed alligators have an unusually strong immune system; unlike humans, alligator immune systems can defend against microorganisms such as fungi, viruses, and bacteria without having prior exposure to them. Scientists believe that this is an evolutionary adaptation to promote quick wound healing, as alligators are often injured during fierce territorial battles."

Comments

Cue TMNTs

[esocid]

I just can't shake the image of leatherhead from teenage mutant ninja turtles from my mind now. whatcouldpossiblygowrong?

Re:Cue TMNTs

[smooth wombat]

I'm going to get flamed for this but here goes anyway: if someone let's their religion dictate what medication or treatment they can or cannot receive, they have no one but themselves to blame for their illnesses or early death.

Like this couple for example. I'm sure there are hundreds of other similar cases you can find with little effort.

The joke about a doctor asking their patient if they believe in ID or evolution determining whether they get a flu shot is very appropriate in this situation.

Re:Cue TMNTs

[MrNaz]

I am a Muslim, and I can say that in Islam, there is a blanket overruling of all prohibited substances in the course of saving a life, such as eating pork in starvation situations or deriving medicine from alcoholic sources. Deriving medication from pigs would be allowed, and so too would medicine from alligator blood.

Most opiate analgesics and anaesthetics are, for example, prohibited under the intoxication rule (the one that prohibits alcohol), but are allowed in medical situations. Same for alcohol used in field treatment of hypothermia and other emergency situations.

I'm not sure about the Kosher rules in Judaism, but in Islam, any substance of medicinal value is permitted if necessary for the health of the patient.

This rule is conscience based I guess, for all of you thinking of that Simpsons episode where the blind guy was smoking weed for "medicinal purposes".

Re:Cue TMNTs

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I understand, the same is true in Judaism. The "laws of kashrut" are overruled when one's life or health is at stake.

It may be helpful to add that Orthadox Jews traditionally keep kosher on a voluntary, not compulsory, basis. That is, the rules are followed in order to honor god, not because there is some terrible consequence or threat involved if they do not do so. It is not a "keep kosher or go to hell" kind of thing. It is more like "God asks that we keep kosher. We love and honor god, so we will therefore, as a practice of worship and respect, keep kosher as god requests."

Re:Cue TMNTs

[John Newman]

Really? I thought that once you had them in a warm environment, alcohol would help increase circulation and even out body temperature. Or perhaps it will cause a sudden rush to the heart of cold blood that was near the skin. I've not got any training in cold weather rescue, so excuse my ignorance.

Alcohol is a mild vasodilator, so it would reverse your body's major defense against cold, restricting blood flow to the extremities/surface and keeping a pool of warm blood in the core. Even after the person is in a warm environment, vasodilation is dangerous because the extremities/skin are cold, the blood there is cold, and suddenly moving a bunch of warm core blood through the cold extremities and back will lower the core temperature further. The teaching is that this could kill a patient by pushing their core temperature down suddenly, past the critical value. When resuscitating a severely hypothermic patient, you always warm from the inside out, and you never give vasodilators.

Is this a joke?

[ben0207]

Were they hoping people wouldn't associate a wonderdrug from a reptile (this shite) with the common phrase "snake oil" (a wonderdrug from a reptile)

superbugs

[biased_estimator]

This new class of drug could also crack so-called 'superbugs' that are resistant to conventional medication.

Sure, until we use these new antibiotics so recklessly (or simply so often) that we select for resistant strains.

Re:superbugs

[Anonymous Coward]

But then we can harvest the proteins from the white blood cells of a different, and even more awesome animal. Everyone wins.

Re:superbugs

[snl2587]

Sure, until we use these new antibiotics so recklessly (or simply so often) that we select for resistant strains.

The fact that people will misuse drugs does not mean we shouldn't make them available. If you read TFA you'll see:

Their previous research also suggests that blood proteins may help fight HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

I'd say the possible faster introduction of superbugs may be worth the risk if we can at least try.

Re:superbugs

[speaktruth]

"The fact that people will misuse drugs does not mean we shouldn't make them available."

Someone should probably tell that to the DEA before we waste any more resources on this whole war on drugs thing.

Re:superbugs

[0xABADC0DA]

What it boils down to is that this reasearch is going to end up killing alligators by making immune germs so that we can raise pigs and chickens under worse conditions. That's what we are talking about really.

Humans need newer antibiotics because we wasted them growing pigs and chickens, and reducing the puss in milk from overproducing cows. Also, even if this 'cures' HIV the benefit is not so much in saving lives but more in protecting a social order that allows it to spread.

This will certainly result in a sad reflection on our society, that we would contribute to the destruction of animals that have been around for hundreds of millions of years. So we can have our pork sandwich for lunch for $0.50 less. But hey since we're giving a collective 'fuck you' to the world anyway, why not?

Re:superbugs

[snl2587]

Whoa, man. We're talking proteins in the blood...after the initial research it will probably be more practical to produce them synthetically.

I take it you're not a fan of medical research as it runs opposed to the natural order of things. But if we are in relative control of our own evolution at the moment, why should we allow our species to disappear? If the whole point of life is to propagate, and we have mechanisms in place to accomplish this basic task better, wouldn't it be against nature to do the opposite?

I find your comment interesting for another reason: you typed your comment on a computer, right? One of the byproducts of modern eco-destructive society? And you likely live in a modern house, use electricity, eat those "pork sandwiches", and probably have benefited from past medical research. The hypocrisy is stunning.

Re:superbugs

[speaktruth]

Two things: first, I understand that you were talking about medical drugs, and do not want to be misconstrued as a proponent of narcotic legalization. Which brings me to my second point that I was alluding to-but did not explain-in my earlier post. Our culture is a drug culture. We are convinced and teach our children that when they have a problem, an illness, there is almost always a drug that can solve that problem. Is it any wonder then that when people have problems they take a drug that will make them feel better? This counts for both legal and illegal drugs and both physical and emotional/psychological issues. It is not availability that is the real issue, it is the paradigm. We live in a drug culture, and the real war on drugs is an effort to maintain control of them by those that benefit most from them: manufacturers of non-naturally occurring and non-replicatable (without a chemistry degree and a lot of equipment) drugs that are sold at ridiculous margins. More drugs is certainly not the answer to any of our problems, medical or otherwise.

Re:superbugs

[repapetilto]

What we really need is a drug for restless mouth syndrome. "Do you find yourself going on and on about whatever you happen to be thinking about, until people tell you they just don't care? You may have RMS, visit www.rms.com to find out if you have RMS. Small print: Shhhitol is not approved by the FDA for treatment of RMS, consult your physician before beginning any off-label drug regimine"

Re:superbugs

[emag]

Ok, I'm surprised I haven't seen this yet, so here goes...

I totally agree with you here, but there is one thing to think about; what happens if we make an even worse epidemic than HIV/AIDS? You mean, something like... Gator-AIDS?

Re:superbugs

[arotenbe]

But then we can harvest the proteins from the white blood cells of a different, and even more awesome animal. Sharks with lasers! Aw, dang, someone got it first...

[runs from moderators with anti-meme missiles]

Re:superbugs

[SimonInOz]

Yes indeed. There are a fair number of different animals that fight a lot and thus should be good at recovery - the Tasmanian Devil comes to mind (nasty vicious thing, currently dying out rather, due to a transmissible cancer spread by, ironically, biting each other). Being very different from the alligator is a good thing here.
Has anyone every looked into vultures - after all, they eat dead carcasses, they must be exposed to quite astounding levels of bugs.
Not to mention other things that eat dead bodies - ants, for example.

And what about vampires ... sorry, drifted off. I'm really missing my weekly dose of Buffy.

Have you seen where these things live?

[Shivetya]

Let alone they eat about anything which doesn't eat them first.

My only concern with this type of approach is how hamstrung will we get when the first protesters arrive? Can we replicate it or at least identify WHY it is so useful or different?

Re:Have you seen where these things live?

[hey!]

My only concern with this type of approach is how hamstrung will we get when the first protesters arrive?

Possibly somewhat, but not as much as if the protesters hadn't been there all along to make sure the species did not become extinct, or too rare to study.

You're probably too young to remember this, but alligator skin used to be quite stylish for handbags, shoes, wallets and the like. Wild populations can provide a sustainable source of goods like this so long as people don't take so many animals that the equilibrium breaks down and the population crashes. However, that's pretty much the inevitable course of events ever since society reached a sufficient technological level to respond to market opportunities with tools that make resource extraction orders of magnitude faster (and thus more profitable).

You, as an alligator hunter, may be smart enough to know you'll make more in the long run by sustainable harvesting, but if your competition is sufficiently inbred, this sounds like hifalutin nonsense to them. When the idiots are making more money than the smart people, the near-idiots emulate the idiots, and pretty soon the people acting intelligently are the only ones who aren't in on the bonanza. At that point the intelligent choice is to act stupidly, because you maximize your long term return by grabbing a share of the breeding stock before even that is liquidated.

Re:Have you seen where these things live?

[DougWebb]

I'm sure people who are vehemently opposed to animal testing will be willing to volunteer their bodies, right?

Many would, but if you try to take them up on that, a whole other group of activists gets involved preventing that testing too.

So, you think "Ok, I just won't test my product then", and a third group of activists pounces on you. There's just no way to get ahead without paying everyone off to make them happy and quiet.

Re:Have you seen where these things live?

[Mordac]

And for those of you who are making all of the croc meat jokes, keep in mind that croc meat is tough, stringy, and lacking in flavor compared to other meats. Alligator meat from Louisana is darn good eats.

Their legs can be treated like Buffalo Wings, very tasty.

The tail is the most popular part, as thats used much like chicken tenders. Most people enjoy fried gator tail. You can go back further up on its back, for the tenderloin, but not as good.

Last part I've tried is the ribs. Very similar to baby back ribs, its a white meat, no question about it when eating the ribs. Yes, the amount of meat to bone isn't all that good, but its good enough to enjoy a slow smoking.

Alligator really is the other other white meat, and one of my favourites.

Hillbilly Research

[eldavojohn]

It's amazing what can be discovered when you're looking for something else. I have an excerpt from the researcher's journal that I found on their site:

"Johnson was busy cutting lines and snorting dolphin brains while playing Brain Age to see if that was increasing his mental capabilities. Heinz was freebasing hawk feathers and taking eye exams to check for increased vision. Me? I was mainlining alligator blood and hoping for some sort of super jaw strength and scales. As we were taking Williams to the hospital (he had grafted a mongoose tail to his ass and entered a pit of asps and vipers) I noticed that all my ulcers and sinuses had cleared up within the hour ..."

What's the cost?

[MozeeToby]

The ability to heal quickly and fight off almost any infection would be a huge adaptation for any animal even without the territory battles. The fact that alligators are one of the few (only?) animals to evolve this adaptation indicates that it comes with a hefty price.

The question is, can we leverage this adaptation for ourselves without incurring the price? If the price is energy expended to produce the ultra efficient immune system, that's fine; but if the price is directly tied to the effects themselves this may prove worthless.

Re:What's the cost?

[Ai Olor-Wile]

The cost is "being a goddamn ten foot long reptile." The cure is "put it in pills." Sheesh, some transhumanists...

Re:What's the cost?

[eln]

It could also be that the changes required to end up with an immune system like that are incredibly complex and may involve steps along the way that are not evolutionarily advantageous in most species, so the necessary sequence of evolutionary steps was not completed in most species. Or, it could just be that by random chance the mutations simply did not occur except in a few species, and did not stick for whatever reason in most cases where it did occur.

To say that there must be some tradeoff implies that evolution's purpose is to produce the most perfectly adapted organism possible, when in fact evolution has no purpose at all. It is a series of mutations that tend to produce organisms that are well adapted, but certainly not perfectly adapted in most cases, to the particular environment they find themselves in.

Or, it might turn out that the tradeoff is that you end up growing tough scaly skin that people like to make into boots and handbags, in which case I look forward to giving my wife a Gucci Human-skin bag in the near future.

Re:What's the cost?

[trybywrench]

The fact that alligators are one of the few (only?) animals to evolve this adaptation indicates that it comes with a hefty price. The question is, can we leverage this adaptation for ourselves without incurring the price? yeah i don't even want to think about the copay

Gator-aid?

[thatseattleguy]

Good for what ails ya.

'nuff said.

I guess what's old is new again.

[b4dc0d3r]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4155522.stm

About three and a half years ago he tested alligator blood and pinpointed why these animals were so resistant to infection. Alligators and crocodiles, like humans, have a natural defence system against invading bacteria, viruses and fungi, which involves a group of proteins called the complement system. When Dr Merchant exposed the alligator blood to pathogens such as HIV, West Nile Virus and E Coli, it started to kill them. "It turns out that this complement system is much more effective than ours.

and that was already 3 years old.

Re:I guess what's old is new again.

[krayzkrok]

I made the initial discovery with saltwater crocodiles back in 1999, and my colleague Dr Gill Diamond named the peptide "crocodillin". So this is really a decade old now!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/680840.stm

Adam Britton

Strong immune system vs evolution rate

[GargamelSpaceman]

Gators/Crocs are famous for having not changed much since the time of the dinosaurs.

I wonder if since they have a very strong immune system that kills viruses etc so well, if they have not denied themselves the opportunity to incorporate useful viral dna and bacterial plasmids into their own dna. It would be interesting to see if they have a different amount of viral origin genes in their genomes than other animals.

Re:Strong immune system vs evolution rate

[MetricT]

I can't help but wonder if they haven't changed since the age of the dinosaurs *because* of their strong immune system. Viruses cause a lot of DNA mutations for natural selection to work with. If your immune system is efficient at killing viruses, that cuts off an entire avenue for helpful mutations to enter the genome. Their source of mutations has been reduced to cosmic rays. Overgeneralized, but I hope you get the idea.

Maybe we should start looking at other dinosaur-era lifeforms and seeing what's in their immune system.

In that vein

[explosivejared]

I'll tell you what could go wrong:

evolutionary adaptation to promote quick wound healing

An angry Wolverine, the four horseman Wolverine to be exact, sues for prior art, and on a technicality gains control of the entire human population's genome. This would quite literally usher in "the" Apocolypse.

Alligator blood?

[lpangelrob]

Alligator blood? Man, that's cold.

Maybe because you have read about it before:

[Maddog Batty]

Crocodile's Immune System Kills HIV - story from 2005

Re:Maybe because you have read about it before:

[krayzkrok]

Yes, that's the research I was involved in. We actually first discovered this way back in 1999! We tested serum activity (and lysed leucocytes) in Australian saltwater crocodiles and later in 2002 in Australian freshwater crocodiles. We called this antimicrobial peptide "crocodillin". The work from 2005 comes from a project I did with Mark Merchant on saltwater crocs where we tried to learn more about the antimicrobial and antiviral activity. This latest media release is essential the same as the previous work, except this time with American alligators because Mark has more of them in the backyard than he does saltwater crocs. Adam

Cost of Complexity is a Myth

[eldavojohn]

There was very recent research that was quite extensive that showed this cost of complexity in evolution is a myth. I don't know why you think it has to come at a cost, it just so happens that alligators needed it to live in their conditions and with their temperaments.

You can sit here all day and question why we don't have some of the obvious advantage traits that any other animal has and the answer is simple: we didn't require it. If humans needed it and didn't have it, we wouldn't be around.

Explain your logic on why this must come at a price? The random evolution happened in alligators and may be present in other animals (or extinct relatives).

Re:Cost of Complexity is a Myth

[eldavojohn]

I'm not saying that the complexity of the immune system implies a cost to the organism, I am saying that this adaptation is so ridiculously advantagious that there must be some cost or it would be much more common (Of course, this conjecture falls apart if the adaptation is more common than the article implies). And yet, here you and I are with opposable thumbs and an increased Broca's Region of our brain ... why don't other animals have these ridiculously obvious advantages? Evolution is random and only reacts to the environment of the organism.

Don't believe that this adaptation is that advantagious? Infections deseases are responsible for 20% of human deaths, second only to heart disease; and that is even with modern antibiotics. A death rate of 20% is inflated because we know how to circumvent so many other forms of death. I'm sure prior to civilized humans, we were killed by many many other things. Not to mention that low death rates can lead to famine and ecosystem failure. How do you know we're not dooming the earth by ensuring everyone lives to age 70 and has 2.4 children? The human population is not kept in check the same way it used to be because of modern antibiotics.

Re:zzz

[berashith]

check out the horseshoe crab. They were going to be completely destroyed until the medical industry offered to pay more for keeping them alive than the fishermen were paying to use them as bait. The species will actually continue only because of their medical uses. Maybe this will help.

There are already decent protections for legal hunting gator, and this may increase the pressure against poaching.

Hi. Maybe you're unaware

[BitterAndDrunk]

Crocodiles are relatives of alligators, but are not the same animal. I know it's confusing because they're very scary animals.

Phage therapy for superbugs

[Zdzicho00]

Regarding 'superbugs'.
I know that it's already possible to cure that type of infections with bacteriophages with success rate above 80% (about 95% for Staphylococcus aureus). Since last 27 years Institute of Immunology and Experimental Therapy of Polish Academy of Sciences (located in Wroclaw) have been involved in curing about 1500 people with suppurative bacterial infections, in which a routine antibiotic therapy failed.

http://www.iitd.pan.wroc.pl/phages/phages.html

This is not a secret thing, so most likely all important people involved in that kind of science (MRSA infections) are aware of this kind of therapy.
Why in other countries (except Poland) is that treatment still not known and not available? Lot of people is dying due to 'superbugs'! MRSA infections alone are responsible for more deaths in the U.S. each year than AIDS!
Why not to let people to try this still EXPERIMENTAL therapy?

Maybe the health care industry got to big inertia or doesn't care or just prefer to cure people with super-expensive brand new antibiotics instead of something relatively cheap.
Is they business case more important then people health or life? They just want to make money instead of curing people?

The final conclusion is that we shouldn't expect anything spectacular regarding 'gator immune system'. Other treatments are already available but simply ignored.
They will not make it available if not sure that it will earn a mountain of bucks for them.
SHOW ME THE MONEY!

/Z

Finally...

[hyades1]

...It looks like my ex will be good for something positive.