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."
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.
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.
It's probably not hooey.
DARPA tends to put blue-sky stuff like this into SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research). You'd be amazed at what comes out of these grants.
Disclaimer: In a previous job, I worked for a company that did work under SBIR.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
As mentioned above, they really do want small businesses.
The big companies might have some extra money to toss at a problem, but they won't without good chances for return.
In this case "small businesses" translates roughly to "those crazy enough to risk economic ruin when they fail".
*note* I realize this post sounds a little negative, that is not the intent. I love DARPA and out of the grants they award has come some truly stunning stuff.
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.