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Creating Bacterial "Fight Clubs" To Discover New Drugs

Posted by samzenpus on from the let's-get-ready-to-rumble dept.

Science_afficionado writes: Vanderbilt chemists have shown that creating bacterial 'fight clubs' is an effective way to discover natural biomolecules with the properties required for new drugs. They have demonstrated the method by using it to discover a new class of antibiotic with anti-cancer properties. From the Vanderbilt website: "That is the conclusion of a team of Vanderbilt chemists who have been exploring ways to get bacteria to produce biologically active chemicals which they normally hold in reserve. These compounds are called secondary metabolites. They are designed to protect their bacterial host and attack its enemies, so they often have the right kind of activity to serve as the basis for effective new drugs. In fact, many antibiotics and anticancer compounds in clinical use are either secondary metabolites or their derivatives."

5 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. The First Rule of Bacterial Fight Club by cold+fjord · · Score: 4, Insightful

    When you find an extra tough, virulent, deadly bacteria, don't let the damn thing get loose!

    --
    much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
    1. Re:The First Rule of Bacterial Fight Club by Evtim · · Score: 2

      That's right! Instead find the phage that kills it and make a medicine...

      For the life of me I cannot understand why the phage treatment was never developed in the west to complement [and in some cases replace altogether] antibiotics. The only reason I can think off is profit. It will be difficult to patent phage strain that is naturally found in the sewer system of a hospital. Also, phages are cheap and we don't want cheap effective medicine, do we? And thus thousands of people in the so called developed nations die from super bugs every year. Those people could have been saved by a bunch of medical professionals from an institute [that looks like the stage for a B horror movie] created by Stalin [see the documentary below; it's very interesting]

      http://topdocumentaryfilms.com...

    2. Re:The First Rule of Bacterial Fight Club by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      I'm done a little work on phage-based antimicrobials for skin infections.

      There are good reasons why phage therapy is largely impractical for medical treatment. The short explanation is that a given 'phage antibiotic' would be effective against only a single species of bacteria and would have to be reformulated every 5 years or so. Testing the safety and efficacy of each of these formulations is costly both in money and time. Under the current US regulatory system, safety and efficacy testing often costs nearly a billion dollars.

      The reason why constant reformulation is necessary is that a phage is highly specific to a substrain of bacteria and those bacteria rapidly evolve resistance - faster than they evolve resistance to traditional antibiotics. In nature, phages rapidly evolve alongside their hosts. However, a 'phage antibiotic' has a defined type of phage - and that phage can't be changed without repeating regulatory testing. So after a few years, the bacterial population will have evolved resistance leaving the phage ineffective.

      There was a great review paper on phage/host resistance/counter-resistance mechanisms in Nature. I can't find a non-paywalled version, but some of the article is here:
      http://www.readcube.com/articles/10.1038%2Fnrmicro2315

  2. What is old is new again! by methano · · Score: 2

    Back in the 70's and 80's, all the pharmaceutical companies had large groups of scientist that spent all their time growing bacteria and stressing them in a huge variety of ways. They collected bacteria from all over the world and grew them up and hit them with all kinds of stress (radiation, chemicals, other bugs, etc) to get them to make interesting and useful secondary metabolites. That's how a lot of drugs, especially antibiotics, were discovered. And if there was some problem with the drugs, the chemists made similar drugs or modifications to those drugs to make them better (like Lipitor). In the 90's there was a fad in the industry to fire all those scientists and replace them with I don't know what. Savings, I think. By the middle of the aughts, they were all gone. I watched it all happen with horror. So if I read the article right, these guys are doing something new and exciting that used to be done routinely 30 years ago. Of course, they're bringing more modern technology to bear on the operation and it's good to see it happening. I just thought the whole process sounded familiar.

  3. Looking at all of the posts here... by ClickOnThis · · Score: 2

    ...I can see that a lot of people are breaking the first rule of Bacterial Fight Club!

    --
    If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.