This class of antibiotics, ADEP, was discovered as a naturally produced substance isolated from the bacteria Streptomyces hawaiiensis in 1985 (Streptomyces has been a fertile source of naturally occurring antibiotics). After some promising results, there was work on synthetically synthesizing it and producing "optimized" synthetic variants. ADEP4 is one of those, and was reported in a paper published in 2005. There's a short 1-page summary of that work in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 4: 957. See page 19 of this PDF, article "Peptide power": http://journals2005.pasteur.ac.ir/NR/4%2812%29.pdf
There's a lot of work trying to understand its mechanism, e.g. here's one open-access paper that also has some background: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2955292/
Here's the paper discussed in the linked article, unfortunately paywalled, but with an abstract available that's actually a good summary: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...
Gives an idea of the sort of development timescale we're talking about. It's almost 30 years from isolation to this point. Clinical trials would take another 10-15 years. So, if all goes well, that's 40 years from the initial discovery until a doctor starts making up prescriptions.
Yet I'm optimistic, because tools that crack biofilms are a new are of development and promise hope for exploring new attacks on bacteria. Current methods of biofilm dispersal are application of strong acids and bases or an autoclave. You can't treat a hospital room with an autoclave, and comprehensive treatment of a room with very strongly ionizing agents has its own risks. There are other, experimental methods, but all are worth examining.
I hope research like this continues.
That's a baseless suspicion. Bacteria are ultimately bound by physical laws, and while they've proven resilient, there's no reason to suggest we will be unable to develop the means to annihilate them at will. Humans are creative - bacteria just evolve fast.
I agree about the importance of the biofilm claim, but what they don't explain is how they actually achieve this. Their method of disabling that particular protein doesn't directly address the problem of the biofilms having a less-permeable extracellular matrix.
Humans are creative at killing bacteria, though it's already not difficult to "annihilate them at will". It's much harder to annihilate only the ones we don't like, only the ones that harm us, and only the ones that pose the greatest risk.
That is, unless antibiotics are wildly over-used and human pathogens are concentrated in one place facing constant medical intervention, human medical intervention is going to be a very small, unimportant part of bacterial evolution.
Unfortunately, antibiotics are widely over used and pathogens are concentrated in poor administered hospitals.
If we stop these practices and we could stop these practices, then antibiotic-resistant bacteria would have little evolutionary incentive to exist.
Yeah, but once we get good enough to annihilate them at will we will also have a similar power to improve them through tinkering.
Just like computer viruses continue to be developed by people, biological agents will be developed as well.
Some human tinkering will be for the heck of it. Some will be government level projects that get out of control. Eventually, organized crime will be in on the action.
Imagine Cryptolocker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryptoLocker) but with a biological agent.
Hmmm... that sounds like an awfully good idea, actually...
Build the hospital room with the ability to be airtight, make sure all materials can withstand 134 C (or remove things that can't for their own cleaning) ... and autoclave the room ...
Like not having mega-hospitals that are impossible to keep entirely clean.
Growing up near the UCLA Medical Center, a vast, vast complex, I heard tales that there were diseases that existed there and nowhere else in the world. Most patients derive little benefit from the scale of the hospital and the fact that in a huge hospital getting all rooms clean at once is logistically very difficult means that scale can be very dangerous.
I have had one of those for almost a decade now.
> He hasn’t tested it in humans yet
How long is the road ahead before it becomes available to regular patients? Should I get my hopes up?
This is sensationalism news, or as it is most often called, news.
I actually found the writing to be pleasantly balanced and scientifically detailed, without jumping to unreasonable conclusions.
It does, of course, involve a certain risk. You should do a lot of thinking before taking such a leap.
Sinuses?
According to the article, this new antibiotic has only been tested on mice and rats. These sort of preliminary results go bust all the time, and so I think that in this case, it's irresponsible to fail to indicate that these are preliminary studies and that the effect hasn't been demonstrated in humans. This could have been achieved by leaving the title the same, or by changing it to "New antibiotic kills off persistent infections in rats".
For example: "DRACO" antivirals from MIT, were developed in 2011, and according to mouse model tests and tests on cultured human cells, is safe and effective against influenza and rhinovirus and everything else they threw at it (see http://mackinstitute.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/20... for details), and yet it could be a decade before we even try to answer questions like "wait, does this cure HIV? It sounds like it might actually cure HIV"
Beyond that, it absolutely should take drugs many years to come to market. Research is hard. Research on human beings is very hard. You can't just take shots in the dark and hope something sticks - you have to understand how, and how well, something works. Even for the established antivirals we do have for HIV, we're still trying to figure out who to give them to and when.
There is actually very little activity occurring in the field of antibiotic drug discovery and you identified the issue; no money in drugs that someone takes for 14 days and stops. Pharmaceutical companies are driven by stockholders and therefore they want them developing drugs that someone takes for the rest of their life (anti-depressants). Much of the research for abx discovery comes from academia who struggle with budgets that are pennies compared to what Pfizer, GSK, Wyeth, Astra can afford.
The primary issue with antibiotics is that since the late 1990's, if you succeed, and you develop the best antibiotic the world has ever seen, the FDA will require it to be a "drug of last resort". It will therefore sit on the shelf and be guaranteed to not be prescribed very much during the life of its patent. Once enough time goes by, and other drugs come out if (and that's a big if) it is no longer a drug of last resort, it is likely off patent and therefore can be made in generic form for pennies by generic manufacturers. Regardless of what you think about patents, these incentives are completely misaligned with companies going all-in and taking a risk on new antibiotics.
You wonder of course why, if that is the case (and I do agree), that the government doesn't get involved with more funding or subsidies for these types of less profitable drugs. The same way they spend countless dollars on other things for the public good (and company profit obviously).
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As a side note the article seems very well written for non-medical folks like myself.
Believe me, in the infectious disease space, drug companies tend to look for cures and prevention. For example, Merck and GSK spent staggering amounts of money on the HPV vaccine.
Which you don't bother with until you know the thing can work in the first place.
See recent study on Rhesus monkeys: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...
The "no bacteria" perspective is usually based off of IDSA guidelines. Unfortunately, they've been successfully litigated against for providing incorrect information that appear to be linked to financial interests:
"My office uncovered undisclosed financial interests held by several of the most powerful IDSA panelists. The IDSA's guideline panel improperly ignored or minimized consideration of alternative medical opinion and evidence regarding chronic Lyme disease, potentially raising serious questions about whether the recommendations reflected all relevant science."
http://www.ct.gov/ag/cwp/view.asp?a=2795&q=414284
Good summary of Lyme: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3636972/
Needless to say, we've got a lot of people we're telling that they are not sick when symptomatically they appear to be.
"Approximately 10 to 20% of patients treated for Lyme disease with a recommended 2–4 week course of antibiotics will have lingering symptoms of fatigue, pain, or joint and muscle aches. In some cases, these can last for more than 6 months. Although often called 'chronic Lyme disease,' this condition is properly known as 'Post-treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome' (PTLDS).
The exact cause of PTLDS is not yet known. Most medical experts believe that the lingering symptoms are the result of residual damage to tissues and the immune system that occurred during the infection. Similar complications and 'auto–immune' responses are known to occur following other infections . . .
Regardless of the cause of PTLDS, studies have not shown that patients who received prolonged courses of antibiotics do better in the long run than patients treated with placebo."
Now available in hand-soap.
