Slashdot Mirror
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?
This post comes with a double-your-money-back guarantee!
Any offense taken to this post is at your sole discretion.
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.
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.
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.
Two reasons, both based on the assumption that delivering medicine to them is trickier than destroying them.
First, if you can achieve the goal of deliving medicine to target cells, then destroying them should be trivial, so you've discovered a way to do both.
Second, it sets your sights higher. If your goal is to find a way to deliver medicine to target cells but you miss the mark and the best you can do is destroy them, you've still accomplished something great (as in a cure for cancer). However, if your goal is to figure out a way to destroy target cells and you fail, you accomplished far less.
"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.
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.
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.
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).
Not if done properly.
My own company has developed a small catalyst that can be covalently bound to a targeting molecule. When released into the bloodstream, the catalyst gathers around the targeted cells and catalyzes the production of superoxide, which directly oxidizes the cell membrane. If you target virulence factors, or certain vital proteins in the membrane, there is no method by which they can develop immunity. Either they evolve to no longer have virulence factors (and are thus no longer a problem), or they have to change their entire membrane structure to an as yet unseen one that resists oxidative damage while still allowing water in, which would make it not only a new species, but a new kingdom.
Actually, it's terrible. It interferes with protein folding, and accumulates in the liver, even when applied topically. Doctors hate the stuff because the silver bandages they use for burn wounds turns black due to the moisture associated with the wound, which makes it so that they can't tell if there is necrosis or not.
IANAD(octor), but my office is directly across from the department of surgery, and I have had discussions about this with them in the past. Silver is the best thing they have commercially available, but it is terrible. My company is developing better antimicrobials for them--non-leeching ones.
I wonder if they weren't so much 'landscapers' as 'fancy lawnmowers' and failed to adapt?
I don't read AC A human right
To elaborate on what the other responder said, antibiotics work because we've discovered chemicals which don't damage human cells but attack specific weaknesses particular to the bacteria we want to kill. That way we can ingest high doses that will affect the bacteria without damaging ourselves.
However because those antibiotics depend on difference in the cell structure between human cells and the bacteria cells the bacteria can effectively evolve to be more like human cells in that regard (in general if not in the specific mechanism) until they are no longer affected by the antibiotic either.
However if you can can deliver substances directly to the cells you want to affect then you can use a chemical which is damaging to practically _all_ life. Like bleach. If you started drinking bleach it would kill you long before you got a high enough concentration in your blood to kill unwanted bacteria. However if you could target it finely enough you could deliver just enough molecules of bleach to the cells you wanted to kill them without having an effect on anything else.
Bacteria can't evolve a defense against that for the same reason they haven't already evolved a defense against it despite the fact that bleach has been used as a cleaner for far longer than antibiotics have been around. It would involve such a massive change to the cell structure that it would effectively be a new form of life adapted to live in bleach and wouldn't find a "normal" environment hospitable any longer.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
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.