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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."
Someone should tell DARPA that chiropractic care can cure drug-resistant bacterial infections.
Who knew?
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I love this. It's right up there with the one about eating muppets - I miss that one.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
The "aimed at small businesses" part is almost certainly hooey, and is being done for political reasons.
Dog is my co-pilot.
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.
The way I read it they have something more like a phage in mind, - something that cannot live or replicate outside the pathogen.
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?
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.
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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.
"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.
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.
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.
By the omission of the line break betwixt and between items 6 and 7, you have invalidated your conclusions.
rewriting history since 2109
That's pretty much true of any tool, in the broadest sense. It can be used to help or hurt, for "good" or "evil"; whether it's medicine, a hammer, a car, a knife, a laser, etc.. regardless of what purpose it was originally designed for.
Ultimately it always comes down to the human wielding it. Which is kinda scary.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
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
Yay! Welcome back Dr Bob! Slashdot just hasn't been the same without you - we've had to make do with lame racist trolls...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Nuke the planetary surface from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Which turned out not to be true.
Funny thing is, medicine is synonymous with poison.
No it's not. Farmaca ("drugs") are synonymous with poison, due to the origin of pharmaceutical substances as poisons, taken under the assumption that they would do more damage to the cause of the host problem than they would do damage to the host (and to the damage the cause of the host problem is causing to the host). There are aspects and form of medicine however that are quite distant from this approach.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
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.
Humans are themselves radioactive on about the same scale bananas are. The amount of radiation involved is so small that it's difficult to express, and the "Banana Equivalent Dose" does not account for how your body actually processes potassium. You're on much safer grounds picking on Brazil nuts, which contain barium. However, regardless of whether you choose to eat either foodstuff, there's enough random isotopes in the rest of your diet to account for about ten times the radiation dose you'd get by eating a banana a day.
By comparison, taking a six-hour plane trip will expose you to more radiation than a year's supply of bananas. How was Africa?
Your body is made up of many things, the overwhelming majority of which are not genetic material. Your genetic material actually has ways of repairing itself, and unrepaired radiation damage to your genome is probably more likely to affect your future offspring than yourself. Generally speaking, if you've had enough radiation exposure to be worried about your chromosomal material, you're probably not going to be around long enough for reproduction to be an issue.
"Radiation" comprises a whole shit ton of things that mostly don't affect humans in the slightest: light and radio waves being the most common. If you live near Fukushima or if your cell phone emits gamma radiation, you should worry. However, there aren't too many sources of harmful radiation, and despite our ever-increasing use of the EM spectrum, life expectancies continue to rise. Cancer rates would be appropriate to discuss under this context, but I will excuse myself from that if you don't mind.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
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
It's scientifically proven effective....
oh
yeah? In other words; if you look through it; there's very little evidence it works and plenty of evidence that with the right luck it can kill you. (with thanks to Wikipedia; there's plenty more where that came from; and it's always worth following up their references)
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
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 would like to correct you, picking a nit, specifically.
Optical radiation (light) doesn't affect my DNA in the slightest. However, it affects me greatly none the less. I cant imagine how many bumps, bruises, scrapes, broken bones and bloody noses I'd have without it!
Thank you, little photons between ~400 and ~750nm for making my life so much easier.
Except when someone on slashdot links to goatse, then I hate you.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
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
"but neither are hemp clothing"
srsly? hemp clothing is underrated if anything.
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'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
I don't know, to me its kinda sad as he makes the whole profession look like crazies when for certain things like back injuries real chiropractic care CAN help. I was left in pretty constant pain after a car wreck (thanks to an off duty cop LOOKING BEHIND HIM while driving 60MPH looking for a fire he had heard on his scanner. Even though I went into the ditch trying to avoid this asshole and he STILL hit me his cop buddies got together and wrote it up as no fault) and thought I'd just have to suffer the rest of my days but I got lucky that a customer turned out to be a chiropractor and in less than 30 minutes my back felt like new (hurt like hell when he did it though) and I haven't had a backache in the nearly 12 years since.
As for TFA let us all hope DARPA can buy our way out of the mess the corps have gotten us in because as Citizens united made clear corps are better people than you are and there is no way in hell they'll give the massive profits they make by stuffing the animals full of antibiotics up.
Between that and the fact that the sewers end up pumping tons of drugs into our rivers, antibiotics, painkillers, hormones, etc we are or borrowed time here. the fish absorb the drugs, the animals and us absorb the fish, and of course bugs become immune in the process. not good folks, not good.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You really need to learn from Dr. Bob. His pro-chiropractic trolls are at least amusing.
I vote Dr. Bob as chiropractor of the year!
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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
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.
I hear that chiropractic care can eliminate the subluxation caused by reading Slashdot. Dr. Bob has open appointments this afternoon and can fit you in.
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It's a lot more profitable to simply force them to pay you money on some bogus patents.
"Big Pharma" is working on new antibiotics all the time. Unfortunately, with antibiotic pressure on the bugs since the 50's, the little buggers are evolving / mutating at a faster rate than the approval process by the FDA. Stage I thru whatever clinical trials take longer and longer, meanwhile the bacteria are developing resistance. Don't see ads for antibiotics? Look through a current issue of the New EnglandJournal of Medicine or Journal of the American Medical Assn. there are the ads. Besides, it's a lot easier to ask doctor for "Something to make me feel better, like the xanax my neighbor's taking" instead of "Gimme Gorillacillin(TM) for my UTI." Besides, most of the 'take for life' meds come off patent eventually. The antibiotics also, just by the time they do, a lot of the bacteria have moved on. No conspiracy here, just a different business model mixed w/ biology.
OK, let's crunch the numbers. A new class of antibiotics is going to cost you round at least $1Bn to develop[*]. Suppose you spend that and discover a totally new class, with no existing bacterial resistance. So, the clinical choices here are (a) prescribe it to every schmuck who thinks it might make his flu get better (and feed it to cows as well - why not?), or (b) give it only to people who are dying of MRSA. Option (a) is stupid as within ten years MRSA is now resistant to your new antibiotic as well, and the FDA (quite rightly) won't sanction it. Option (b) means that your total market is maybe 5,000 people per year in the western world. How are you going to recoup your $1Bn? This "pharma aren't interested in making you better" meme is a pile of crap. Pharma are interested in anything that will make them money. The first company to bring a cure-all for cancer to market is going to make so much cash that they'll drown in it. However, antibiotics are a place the the wonderful free market just fails. Unless there is some sort of subsidy, significant numbers of new antibiotics aren't going to be developed unless the drug resistance problem gets a whole lot worse.
[*] Yes, I know there are pointless Salon articles claiming that the real cost is 47 cents. They're talking bollocks.
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?
ceftaroline
daptomycin
linezolid
tigecycline
fidaxomicin
telavancin
doripenem
ertapenem
Oh gee, I don't know. Maybe you simply don't know because ordinary people aren't concerned about curing infections. And pharmaceutical companies understand this with their marketing campaigns. People are more worried about putting their dollars into their mood, their erectile dysfunction, and their botox injections. Have you ever seen a patient walk into an office and write a big check to a cardiologist for a left heart catheterization and possible interventional procedures? Compare that to how many patients walk into an office and write a big check for hCG injections or a tummy tuck...
And keep in mind this is not by any means an all-inclusive list of new and useful antibiotics introduced over the last 5-10 years. Also, contrary to popular belief, older and cheaper antibiotics will, most of the time, get the job done as well or better with most infections today.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Unbelievable that some maroon would mod you as 'troll'.. The whole system of moderation, has of late, been invalidated by irresponsible, or intentionally incorrect moderations. Re your response.. Absoutely. The very first thing that cam,me to mind was the mis-application of this form of bioengineering. Targeted mods like this are , guaranteed, going to be used in weapons systems. The fact that the summary itself uses the phrase 'Bioweapons' shows their true focus. To my best knowledge, I simply don't recall any instance of therapeutic treatments being called bioweapons!
The plural of anecdote may not be data, but with hundreds of thousands of positive anecdotes and no conclusive research one way or another it's ludicrously dishonest to say chiropractics is simply unscientific crap.
No; It would be dishonest for me to say it's "ineffective crap" because there's insufficient research behind me in this case to say it's all bad. On the other hand, to say that it's "unscientific crap" is exactly right. The small scale studies are deeply contradictory and the largest scale surveys in multiple areas say that there is no evidence that it works. That means that using it and believing it works is
The only thing which differentiates scientific / evidence based medicine from "alternative" medicine is that the first one "works". This is nothing to do with the method; the beliefs of the practitioner; the spiritual state of the believer. This is the reason why Acupuncture, despite having a deep basis in bullshit, is a scientifically supported effective treatment useful in treatment of chronic pain. Because in double blind tests it turns out to work. There are thousands of different treatments available; bleeding; aromatherapy; exorcisim; homeopathy; voodoo; massage; herbs etc. etc. Every one of them has "thousands of positive anecdotes", but, every one of them has also been investigated for effectiveness. If no effectiveness has been shown then they are exactly "unscientific crap".
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
but the more diseases you cure with antibiotics, the longer people live...and the more treatment is required to treat age-related issues...
From what I remember studies have shown that chiropractic "medicine" only helps lower back pain as well as traditional medicine. Even then, it only matches the effectiveness of traditional medicine. For all other issues, including upper back pain, chiropracty (is that a word?) has been shown to be less effective than traditional medicine. Due to that I really don't see much point in it existing as a practice but people think it helps so I guess that's the reason it's around.