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New Approach Disarms Deadly Bacteria By Scott Fields Special to LiveScience posted: 29 December 2006 08:21 am ET
A warmer, gentler approach to controlling bacteria may be the answer for the emerging menace of drug-resistant diseases.
For more than 50 years antibiotics, such as penicillin, have been the ammunition in war against a rogues gallery of scourges from tonsillitis to typhoid fever. Recently, however, antibiotics have begun to lose their mojo.
So many strains of bacteria now shrug off garden-variety antibiotics that scientists at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have tagged drug resistance as a growing threat to human and animal health. Just some of the diseases that are increasingly hard to treat are tuberculosis, gonorrhea, malaria, and the ear infections that plague little kids.
Health experts warn that if bacteria keep toughening up, some deadly diseases that have been treatable for the last five-plus decades again will have no cure.
Disarming approach
A better battle plan may be to make nice. Instead of killing off disease-causing bacteria, just disarm them, said bacteriologist Marcin Filutowicz. The problem with traditional antibiotics is that they use the neutron bomb approach: they indiscriminately kill off bacteria, and for potent drugs and high doses can bump off virtually every bacterium in a patient's body.
That causes a couple of problems, Filutowicz said. One is that the bacteria the body needs, such as to aid digestion, can be collateral casualties. The other is that clear-cutting the body's bacteria leaves fertile ground in which new bacteria can grow. And the bacteria that move into this available real estate are usually the ones that were brawny enough to survive the antibacterial barrage.
``When you start repopulating your skin, your GI track, your nostrils, all of the non-sterile parts of your body, then opportunistic pathogens have as equal a chance of repopulating your body as the good bacteria,'' Filutowicz explained.
The process of killing off vulnerable bacteria while providing territory for tough bacteria to occupy leads to drug-resistant diseases, Filutowicz said. But if harmful bacteria--for example, the Neisseria meningitidis that causes spinal meningitis--could be left in place, but modified so that it couldn't cause the disease, drug-resistant strains wouldn't have space in which to expand.
Toothless
Filutowicz and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin at Madison have begun exploit a weakness in the structure of bacteria.
Some small organisms, including bacteria, store their DNA two ways, on the chromosome and on what are called ``plamids,'' little chunks of DNA that are not vital to keeping a bacteria alive. The genes that let some bacteria causes disease (their ``virulence genes) and the genes that protect bacteria from antibiotics (their ``antibiotic resistance genes'') ride plasmids.
The weapon of choice for attacking these troublesome plasmids is ``displacins,'' which are bits of DNA from other kinds of bacteria, he said. These displacins can displace plasmids from bacteria cells, leaving the bacteria toothless, but alive.
``The charm and the power of displacin technology is that you don't kill the culprit, but you disarm it,'' Filutowicz said. ``And because you disarm bacteria of their virulence and antibiotic resistance genes, you don't produce a void in their environment. This is critical, that you don't produce the emptiness in the environment that then can be competed for by pathogens and non-pathogens to occupy this void.''
The research group has a library of millions of DNA fragments from bacteria, some from the 3 percent or so of bacteria that can be cultured in laboratories, but most extracted from the 97 percent of bacteria that grow only in nature. In fact, their DNA library has been culled from bacteria that live in soil. The scientists' compassionately conservative strategy is to splice displacins that disarm specific bacteria onto E. coli bacteria (but not the news-making toxic kind).
These E. coli will carry the bad-bacteria-busting displacins into the battlefield that is a patient's body without, Filutowicz hopes, losing the drug-resistance war.
Posts: 294 | From nevada | Registered: Sep 2005
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luvs2ride
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Good article Welcome. Thanks!
Luvs
-------------------- When the Power of Love overcomes the Love of Power, there will be Peace. Posts: 3038 | From america | Registered: Oct 2005
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MagicAcorn
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Thanks
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Marnie
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"The weapon of choice for attacking these troublesome plasmids is ``displacins,'' which are bits of DNA from other kinds of bacteria, he said. These displacins can displace plasmids from bacteria cells, leaving the bacteria toothless, but alive."
Likely this has already been happening...bacteria evolving as they "procreate" with similar pathogens and share DNA bits and pieces.
The common cold virus has been used to fight skin cancer (thought to be viral triggered). It was injected at the skin cancer site.
Competition for nutrients.
Not so long ago, scientists found that the virus that causes SARS, needed a specific enzyme.
Instead of blocking that enzyme, they gave the (mice) more.
Know what happened?
The virus locked onto the excess and left the system.
The mouse did NOT get SARS.
Back to choline...
Do we simply flood the system with lecithin (choline and phosphorus) - keep the levels high throughout the day to "lure" Bb out of the deep tissues? Once out in the "open"...more accessible to destruction by our own antibodies?
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AliG
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Oooh, I like that idea, Marnie!
Thanks for posting this, Welcome! I'd love it if they could find a better way of dealing with this! It's great to hear people coming up with promising new strategies!
Ali
-------------------- Note: I'm NOT a medical professional. The information I share is from my own personal research and experience. Please do not construe anything I share as medical advice, which should only be obtained from a licensed medical practitioner. Posts: 4881 | From Middlesex County, NJ | Registered: Jul 2006
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johnnyb
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That IS cool stuff.
My LLMD mentioned (but did not recommend to me bec of obvious risks) that in other countries they infect people with malaria to kill the lyme infection.
Said that it seemed to work well against lyme, but bec of the damage the malaria did, they were never quite right after that.
Choice of evils, I guess...
- JB
Posts: 1197 | From New Jersey | Registered: Jul 2005
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