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DARPA Requests Replacement To Antibiotics
eldavojohn writes "In the grand scheme of things, antibiotics are a very temporary solution to aid humans in combating bacteria. Bacterial resistance to said antibiotics is an increasing fear and DARPA's 'Rapidly Adaptable Nanotherapeutics' solicitation reveals they're interested in a more permanent solution as modifying the genes of harmless bacteria can result in powerful bioweapons. Like siRNA, DARPA is hoping for more nanomolecules that can specifically target cells and deliver medicine to them anywhere in the body. Most amazing about this proposal is that it's aimed at small businesses and hopes to turn a process that takes decades to study a new antibiotic into a few weeks to manufacture nanomedicine to specifically target bacteria."
[NB. I've been away for a while, busy giving life saving Chiropractic treatments at famine-ravaged refugee camps in Africa]
The proposed "solution" is even worse than the antibiotics it is intended to replace.
A bacteria modified to attack cancer cells needs only to have its "cancer-only" chromosome modified to "attack-all-cells" which would spell doom for the patient.
It's not as far-fetched as one would thing. Chromosomes are modified all the time. Radiation from cell phones, smoke detectors and nuclear reactors beat the tar out of your chromosomes 24/7. Even bananas are radioactive; NEVER EVER eat bananas lest you flood your system with subluxation-causing radiation.
There are a handful of things you need for optimal health (note that BigPharma toxins are not one of them):
1) Get plenty of exercise
2)Get plenty of sleep
3)Maintain a calorie restricted, high protein, low carbohydrate, organic, vegan diet
4) Get regular Chiropractic adjustments to keep your nervous system performing at its best
5) Meditate regularily
6)Stay Radiation Free 7) Never set foot in the Big Pharma controlled "medical system". One foot in the "MD's office" is one foot in your grave.
Bob.
Chiropractic Saves Lives!
The "aimed at small businesses" part is almost certainly hooey, and is being done for political reasons.
Dog is my co-pilot.
nanomolecules that can specifically target cells and deliver medicine to them anywhere in the body
Instead of delivering medicine, why not make them carry some sort of nano weapon to destroy the target cells?
Nuke the planetary surface from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
DARPA + Nanites = A Better World. Only the USA could responsibly use such a technology for the betterment of all mankind.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
It is massively unfortunate that antibiotics have fallen due to misuse. By all means the *should* be viable for decades to come, but that has been ruined by ignorance. To this day I know people who despite being aware of the issue from the news, doctors, and long lectures by me, discontinue their course before it's done and then hoard those antibiotics to take when they have a cold or the flu. Yet they have been informed thoroughly as to why this is bad and why antibiotics don't even try viri.
This is not a matter of educating the public. The public has been educated yet they ignore it. I have never understood where this profound ignorance comes from. This is a major hot button for me.
Past all that, if any organization can formulate something new and better I suppose that would be DARPA.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
The 7th looks the most promising
Bob,
You are the reason I submit any medical news to Slashdot. Your (Score: -1) batshit insanity brightens my day.
I will take a karma hit to say this: I love you Bob! Keep up the good work fighting the front lines with *snicker* chiropractics in Africa!
eldavojohn
My work here is dung.
It's like they saw the idea... and just reached out and grabbed it!
... Ack... phttt.
Genius
I for one welcome our nan...hey... where did everyone go?
Oh, and btw... IAAD...and this sounds...like possibly the worst idea I have heard this decade..
"antibiotics are a very temporary solution to aid humans in combating bacteria"
The problem is overuse - factory farming is unsustainable for this reason alone, but putting an end to high density meat production and doing a better job with limiting antibiotic use among humans would not only stop the development of antibiotic resistance, it would reverse the process. Evolution cuts both ways, bacteria may evolve a resistance to antibiotics but they give something up in the process. If you remove the stimulus then, given time, the process will reverse.
Of course, ending factory farming would mean more expensive meat (i.e. big government nanny-state), but more importantly would cut into the profits of a few certain companies. So DARPA comes up with this instead.
Bacteriophages are being used to cure such infections in one of polish hospitals. For example MRSA is being cured in 80% of cases.
Therapy is safe and cheap:
http://www.aite.wroclaw.pl/phages/phages.html
Why you are not going to see such treatments in your country?? Phages are not patentable, so no way to earn hard cash here.
Funny thing is, medicine is synonymous with poison. What can heal can also kill. I can only see new weapons created alongside new medicine in terms of military use. For example, nanmolecules that target bad cells can probably be programmed to target good cells as well. This, however, would be a boon for natural diseases which is definitely alot more common even on the battlefield where wounds can lead too all sorts of infections. Hope this research pans out as it's definitely a worthy goal.
Agreed. It's absolute insanity.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
In the grand scheme of things, antibiotics are a very temporary solution to aid humans in combating bacteria. Bacterial resistance to said antibiotics is an increasing fear
Some bacteria replicate every 20 minutes. That's 72 opportunities a day for them to catch onto at least the beginnings of a method to bypass an antibiotic. And mutations are to increasing environmental survivability as brute force cracking is to opening a file with 2056-bit XYZ+ encryption. It'll work eventually, but 99.99999% of the time (literally) you and your entire family tree are long dead before anything significant happens.
Good thing there are at least 100 quadrillion bacterial cells inside every human body, for a grand total of a fucking buttload of bacterial family trees to carry on the crack. Not to mention the uncountable number outside of humans, mutating and reproducing in thousands of different environments but all theoretically capable of suddenly mutating that one last step that allows them to survive in a human body while completely bypassing the human immune system and antibiotics almost entirely.
Anyone who, in the last 25 years, ever thought antibiotics were a persistent defense system against bacteria was hopelessly optimistic and misinformed about microbiology.
Overall, people just need to calm the hell down. I'm not saying we stop treating disease or cease using antibiotics or saying any other defeatist, fatalist nonsense. I'm just saying we exist at the pleasure of the bacteria, prions, and viruses that outnumber other terrestrial life by a factor of trillions. It's just one of those things that could kill us at any second but probably won't, like asteroid strikes and nuclear war. The sooner Westerners have their collective "How I learned to stop worrying and love bacteria" moment, the better. We can move on to things we can actually can full control.
Before getting excited about this, just remember that the bulk of DARPA projects fail to produce anything. The reason is that they micromanage projects and generally hire companies to do the work who are really only after the money.
I just love the mission of DARPA:
"DARPA’s mission is to prevent technological surprise for the United States and to create technological surprise for its adversaries."
It's the closest thing we've got to a science fiction agency or MIB (the first good movie at least). Too bad I'm not smart enough to work there. (The company I was at did get its basic technology for image compression fom DARPA, now that technology and variations on it, are used in movie theaters around the world.)
Returning to the subject: their goal seems crazy ambitious (defeat 3.5 billion years of bacterial evolution?). Still, I heard of a project at MIT where researchers had shown (in mice) a technique which would defeat just about ALL virusis (they tried it on dengue, influenza, H1N1). So who knows? Still, gotta be just a teensy bit worried because a good bio-offense (weapon) depends on a good bio-defense.
don't update until the first patch comes out
rewriting history since 2109
This far and still no Ghost in the Shell SAC references?
#DeleteChrome
It is massively unfortunate that antibiotics have fallen due to misuse. By all means the *should* be viable for decades to come ...
Decades? When you look at the power of evolution over time -- and I mean time as in evolutionary time -- it is simply amazing and a "solution" like antibiotics is no more than a very brief band-aid. I'm not in the medical fields but as the population of humans on this planet skyrockets, we become more and more vulnerable to just being massive petri-dishes waiting for that one antibacterial resistant strain. From the definition of antibiotics:
The term antibiotic was coined by Selman Waksman in 1942 to describe any substance produced by a microorganism that is antagonistic to the growth of other microorganisms in high dilution.
In the evolutionary sense, these antibiotics are merely one more constraint on the freedom to populate of these bacteria. It's not a fix, it's an antagonist of growth. I'm not advocating us to stop using antibiotics -- use whatever we got, the bacteria will evolve one way or another. I'm just saying that "a couple of decades" of use is really quite laughable and planckian in the grand scheme of things.
You're correct to be upset at people who make themselves petri dishes full of a weak dilution of antibiotics as those bacteria will probably have a higher branching factor but the purpose of DARPA's proposal is not to fix what they are doing wrong (go forth with your PSA). It's to permanently fix the threat of bacteria -- or perhaps mastering our control over eukaryotes altogether.
My work here is dung.
Remember the Slashdot post in August about MIT curing all viruses? http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/antiviral-0810.html
It seems they used a similar if not nearly identical technique, insert RNA into pathogen to neutralize it.
Explain to me how whatever we come up with won't provide an evolutionary pressure when misused, and become worthless after the bacteria evolves...
Various forms of silver have killed bacteria for a couple thousand years without fail. It is currently used to sanitize hospitals and protect burn injuries. Many take it internally and claim good results.
Unfortunately it's unpatentable and of no interest to corporations.
...omphaloskepsis often...
The Soviet Union was a developer and user of phage therapy -- viruses adapted to target undesirable bacteria -- since way back last century (1920s as I recall). Maybe our "advanced" agency should look into this old technology -- we could sure use a phage that works against MRSA. Of course this approach presents hazards of its own....
Why do people think so much inside the box and reach so low?
Probably because they're being far more realistic than you are.
For one thing, our own immune systems can already "upgrade" themselves - that's how vaccines work.
We can't even fully secure our computers, so how do you expect us to be able to secure our own immune system against real viruses? And even if we do develop an upgraded immune system that is immune to all known viruses and harmful bacteria, what happens when some of our white-listed bacteria (some bacteria in our bodies are symbiotic to an extent, so we'd want to keep them) develop some new mutation that proves harmful to us? We're back to having to patch up our immune system the same way you have to patch a computer.
Right now I like letting my own highly evolved immune system deal with as many problems as it can, and only relying on medicine when my body is unable to protect itself.
which is totally what she said
Evolution cuts both ways, bacteria may evolve a resistance to antibiotics but they give something up in the process. If you remove the stimulus then, given time, the process will reverse.
Not exactly. The bacteria evolved their resistance genes under extremely intense selection pressures. Novel antibiotics are the hydrogen bombs of the microbiology world. The bacteria survived in a given person because there are quintillions of them, reproducing dozens of times per day. Their natural mutation rate brute forced a genetic solution to the problem.
However, genetic drift (the process by which genes could disappear at the population or species level when they're not under any selection pressure, as the resistance genes wouldn't be if we stopped using an antibiotic) isn't inherently quick, and it's slower with larger population sizes, so bacteria - with worldwide population sizes in the octillions - are pretty much immune to losing any gene entirely that isn't experiencing an active selection pressure.
All of this is to say that, baring a wait time of hundreds of trillions of years, there's almost no chance the genes lending resistance to a particular antibiotic will leave a bacterial species once they've arrived. By the time humans notice a resistance it's way too late.
The best you can do is moderate your use of antibiotics and buy yourself more useful time with each particular drug, as less usage is less selection pressure. There's never going to be a way of recovering an antibiotic that's already being resisted, however.
I read once that it might be possible to use bacteriophages (those spider-shaped viruses that eat bacteria) to kill harmful bacteria in humans.
"That's either incredibly asinine or the most brilliant troll I've ever read. Not sure which." -Anonymous Coward
Of course, some bacteriophages actually produce virulence factors when they infect bacteria (e.g. Diptheria: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diptheria#Mechanism)
If there is one thing the FSM has taught us humans is that beer volcanoes are awesome. If there are two things the FSM has taught us, it is that nature finds a way. Or maybe that was Jurassic Park. Hmmm...
-- The Genesis project? What's that?
I've been doing biotech for 20years, and every few years there is some hot new idea that is gonna revolutionize drug development
antisense, gene therapy, miRNA, stem cells...billions in, almost nothing out (caveat: we do have some macular degeneration drugs; what is interesting is that this is a topical treatment ; topical treatments work for very few diseases)
In particular, for the antisense there were these slides you saw at the conferences, traditional drug development 10years/500 million dollars per drug, antisense, 2 years/50 million (or some variation of these numbers)
10 years later the slides were recycled for miRNA; same slides, just change "antisense" to "miRNA"
I've been doing biotech for 20years, and every few years there is some new initiative out of DC that leads to lots of small companies getting grants that go nowhere.
There are a handful of exceptions, eg GenProbe, early on, had a huge (for the time and place) DARPA grant - 10 million if I recall
Sounds good to me, it'll pay my salary, but don't keep up waiting for the miracle drugs
I'm amazed that nobody has either tagged or posted WCPGW yet. :-)
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I wonder if they weren't so much 'landscapers' as 'fancy lawnmowers' and failed to adapt?
I don't read AC A human right
The answer to antibiotic-resistant bugs is to develop *new* and *different* antibiotics. It's that whole diversity thing, y'know? The problem is that Big Pharma is no longer interested in developing drugs that make you better. There's far more money involved in developing drugs that you have to take for the rest of your life. When was the last time you saw a television commercial for an antibiotic? Nope, they'd rather have you on an antidepressant, a cholesterol medicine, a supplement for people whose antidepressants are rendered less effective by their cholesterol medicine, something for the high blood pressure resulting from the previous three medications, and of course something to perk up the old limp noodle from time to time.
Cure sickness? Once? Where's the money in that?
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In some parts of Africa, malaria is becoming vulnerable to the oldest drug against it, quinine, again. After quinine use was abandoned because it was ineffectual, malaria apparently got rid of the expensive biochemical hardware needed to deal with quinine.
How about if this works with antibiotics? Stop using penicillin for 20 years, and then it works again?
--PM
With the rate bacteria are evolving by the middle of the century will be able to negotiate with them.
Just Nuke all the bacteria from the face of earth!!! That'll show 'em bacteria who's the boss around here!
Remember, Comrades,
DARPA is the acronym for D.EFENSE A.dvanced R.esearch P.rojects A.gency
and should read
O.FFENSE A.dvanced R.esearch P.rojects A.gency !!!
Yours In Novosibirsk,
K. Trout, Scientist
P.S. : Gewt Ningrich for Town Clown !!
Well the "aimed at" part might actually produce a bunch of hooey considering that some researchers somehow figured out that duck spoof has antibiotic properties. And if that makes you squeamish at the thought, the Scandinavians have figured out that human spoof does too! Now to convince your girlfriend/wife that you are really trying to help her when she gets strep throat.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
It's a lot more profitable to simply force them to pay you money on some bogus patents.
If you don't know, bacteriophages are basically viruses that attack and "consume" bacteria. Phages are naturally some of the most abundant things in the world. They're an older working alternative that hadn't been explored that far b/c of the success of antibiotics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriophage
So the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is attempting to make bio-weapons and medicine? That is what I understand from reading the article. sorry, I can't think straight today.
The smartest people on the planet have to ASK how to replace antibiotics? I'd like to request a new DARPA please. This is such a simple subject that has been covered in detail in medical literature that it biggles the mind they are ignorant of the multitude of antibiotic substitutes. Let me go in my refrigerator and lets see what we find:
Stonyfield Organic Plain Yogurt (with 6 live strains of beneficial bacteria cultures) You can buy this stuff at WalMart.
Integrative Theraputics Para-Gard
Solaray Multidophilus 12 (with 12 live strains of beneficial bacteria cultures) *** really good stuff***
Uva Ursi
Caprylic Acid
Sodium Butyrate
Mastica
Colostrum
Garden of Life Probiotic Formula
Enzymatic Therapy DGL (deglycyrrhizinated licorice)
Kyolic Aged Garlic Extract
Reduced Glutathione
Vitamin C
R Lipoic Acid
Taurine
Silymarin
Whole Whey
Fresh Organic Honey (got a dog bite or bad cut? Put honey on it)
Organic Vinegar (secret recipe to cure food poisoning: At first symptoms of nausea take two liberal teaspoons of honey and drink two teaspoon fulls of vinegar in water. Nausea should begin to subside in 20 minutes)
Organic Green Tea
Organic Black Tea
Thats just the contents of my refrigerator and kitchen cabinets. Also good are:
Sea Vive (cultured fish protien)
Proboost Thymic Protien A
Jarrow Saccharomyces Boulardii + MOS
Fructo Oligo Saccharide
Also, you might want to consult a guide about using medicinal Herbs. I use "The Healing Herbs" by Michael Castleman
And read anything by Sherry A. Rogers.
To qualify as a professional you would perform the proper medical test to find out the exact strain of bacteria you are fighting and use the exact probiotic that is found to be effective against it instead of using the shotgun effect. Your mileage may vary.
The problem with antibiotics is that they are used in agriculture and they are being prescribed to patients to shorten sick leave of 4 days to sick leave of 3 days.
We should return to developement of new arsenic based antitibiotics (salvarsan was such). They would not be given to cattle or to patients that survive unharmed without them.
The other problems is that antibiotics are bad business, it better to tread diseases of lifestyle and old age, since that is where the money is. Curing is bad business compared to treating diseases.