It's rare to find good news coming under the tag of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, so it is a pleasure to follow-up my grim post, World must consider antibiotic-resistant pathogens to be same level of a threat as climate change, of a few days ago, with three possible breakthroughs that give us some hope against a still dire and growing threat.
If nothing else, my hope is that our first article will improve your understanding of how colonies of bacteria use biofilms as a strategy to accelerate their multistage spread, and how a peptide called 1018 destroys this capability in many strains. Our second and third articles will mention how scientists are also exploring the use of PPMOs and bacteriophages as alternative ways of attacking antibiotic resistant bacteria.
Wikipedia tells us a biofilm "is any group of microorganisms in which cells stick to each other on a surface. These adherent cells are frequently embedded within a self-produced matrix of extracellular polymeric substance (EPS)."
Biofilm extracellular polymeric substance, which is also referred to as slime (although not everything described as slime is a biofilm), is a polymeric conglomeration generally composed of extracellular DNA, proteins, and polysaccharides. Biofilms may form on living or non-living surfaces and can be prevalent in natural, industrial and hospital settings.
In Medical Daily, Dana Dovey reports
Drug-Resistant Biofilm Don't Stand A Chance Against These 12 Amino Acids. What we learn in this article is that colonies of bacteria form
biofilms, a protective "goop" that helps them ward of antibiotics and adds an extra layer of defense to their antibiotic resistance.
With increasing numbers of bacteria evolving to become resistant to our overly used antibiotics, some scientists are exploring a different strategy for fighting them, "don't kill the bacteria, just stop their colonization." Attacking and destroying a bacteria colony's ability to form a protective biofilm that acts like a "bacteria incubation chamber" offers a separate avenue of weakening their defenses and fighting, or preventing an infection from spreading.
Like humans, bacteria like to gather in groups. These colonies of bacteria are called biofilm. [...] They (bacteria) cover themselves in a sort of goop that’s a shield against antibiotics, allowing them to grow rapidly. When they sense there are enough of them, they try to leave the body,” Dr. Bonnie Bassler, a microbiologist at Princeton University told Bacteriality. This biofilm is able to grow on living and non-living material and is responsible for at least 65 percent of all human infections, Medical News Today added.
The anti-biofilm molecule, a peptide known as 1018, is only made of 12 amino acids. [...] In the recent study, peptide 1018 destroyed biofilms in strains of bacteria, including several drug-resistant strains. Not only was 1018 able to destroy the biofilms but it prevented them from forming again.
I found this next tidbit of good news while following up the many lessons learned from readers in the comments of my May 25 post on antibiotic-resistant pathogens. I was looking for the "PPMO article brought to our attention by Wolf 10. Brian Krans of Healthline writes Two New Antibiotic Alternatives That Could Save Lives. The first is PPMOs: A New Approach to Fighting Bacteria
Researchers at Oregon State University and other institutions say bacteria’s new worst enemy may be a peptide-conjugated phosphorodiamidate morpholino oligomer, or PPMO. These lab-synthesized forms of DNA or RNA can silence specific genetic targets, and researchers say they function better than a standard antibiotic without the risk of bacteria becoming resistant to them.
Researchers tested PPMOs against infections in animals caused by two strains of Acinetobacter, which is affecting overseas troops. Researchers say the PPMOs performed better than broad-spectrum antibiotics against A. baumannii, which can cause respiratory infections and sepsis and can be deadly to people with a weakened immune system.
Unlike antibiotics, which attack a bacteria cell’s function and can cause other side effects, PPMOs disrupt the bacteria’s genes. Issues of toxicity need to be addressed in further testing before PPMOs can be used in humans, the researchers said.
In our last article we will see how a special class of bacteria eating viruses can be specifically targeted to attack just one strain on bacteria while leaving others alone - something useful for preserving the other good flora in our intestines, for example.
Brian Krans indicates that the previous research was published in the latest issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases. and the next article references "Death by Virus: C. diff May Have a Natural Enemy"
C. diff"is one of the natural microbes found in your gut, but chronic antibiotic use can make it go haywire. It’s also one of the many superbugs turning up at hospitals. It caused 14,000 deaths and 250,000 hospitalizations between 2005 and 2011, according to the CDC. ...Specialists at the University of Leicester and AmpliPhi Biosciences Corporation have found phages, viruses that eat bacteria, to specifically target C. diff. They work by attaching to bacteria as a host, injecting their DNA—which replicates—and causing the bacterial cell to burst open.
Researchers say these phages are effective against 90 percent of the most clinically relevant C. diff strains in the United Kingdom.
“The key advantage of using phages over antibiotics lies in their specificity. A phage will infect and kill only a specific strain or species of bacteria. This is particularly important when treating conditions like C. diff infections, where maintenance of the natural balance of gut bacteria greatly reduces the chance of relapse,” Dr. Martha Clokie, from the University of Leicester's
So, these are just a few of the possibly encouraging linesof research on horizon, which require all of the usually caveats that they must still pass many obstacles, pilot tests, trial runs, safety approvals, etc, before we may have real solution we can use in people.
While this research provides hope, let me remind readers that just antibiotic-resistant MRSA alone is now killing around 19,000 people per year in the U.S. Doctors and scientists are warning us of a realistic possibility sometime in our future, that common surgeries may become too risky due to our inability to control antibiotic resistant infections.
This is why I support Woolhouse and Farrar in their call for the formation of a new international body to confront antimicrobial resistance at the global level modeled after the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, IPCC, called the Intergovernmental Panel on Antimicrobial Resistance, IPAMR , - which "would involve a broad range of experts, from specialists in clinical and veterinary medicine, to epidemiologists, microbiologists, pharmacologists, health economists and international lawyers."
We must not remain so complacent as we have in the case of global warming and climate change that we wait until the crisis is upon us before we start to act, because just is is the case with climate change, the actions we need to take to resolve these problems have delay times that are measured in decades. Isn't this worth making our best effort to try to prevent as many needless deaths, and as much human suffering, as is possible?
Please join me in committing to support efforts to find solutions to the challenges of antibiotic resistant microbes. Thank you, and thank you for reading such an overly long article.
7:36 PM PT: Please check out some my other posts of the last 24 hours.
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