DARPA Requests Replacement To Antibiotics 193
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."
"Aimed at small businesses" (Score:3, Insightful)
The "aimed at small businesses" part is almost certainly hooey, and is being done for political reasons.
Re:Why still delivering medicine? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Don't worry. Be Happy now. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:SURPRISE! (Score:3, Insightful)
You seem to have fallen victim to the classic evolution misunderstanding.
bacteria have been evolving for billions of years, and all of that means exactly squat when we come up with a completely novel, artificial weapon against them.
evolution is the act of random mutations surviving, so a bacteria from 3.5 billion years ago would have exactly the same chance of surviving DARPAs new weapon as today's would (not much).
Re:Phage therapy helps in 80% of infections (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [wroclaw.pl]
Why you are not going to see such treatments in your country?? Phages are not patentable, so no way to earn hard cash here.
This is ridiculous. MRSA is curable in 100% of cases in the United States right now using current antibiotics and/or surgery (to remove a source of infection that drugs can't penetrate). The question is not whether or not medical science can kill the infection, the question is whether the patient is healthy enough to recover from the damage already wrought by the infection in the first place by the time they're treated. Anyone who has actually worked in an intensive care unit, instead of armchair doctoring, can attest to this.
Example: had a nursing home patient admitted a year ago for pneumonia. Causative organism was Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Fairly resistant, treated with doripenem and tobramycin. Killed the Pseudomonas with a standard 14 day course of treatment (repeat washings and cultures: negative), but much of her left lung was already chewed up into a necrotic mush. Bronchopleural fistulas from the damage required chest tubes and chronic ventilation through a tracheostomy. Eventually taken to surgery for a pneumonectomy. Survived the surgery, but gradually worsened in her general health and never could be weaned from the ventilator until finally her family withdrew care.
Phages may well have a good clinical benefit, and may eventually take a prominent place as another weapon in the healthcare arsenal against infection, but until I see the randomized controlled trials showing their superiority (or even noninferiority with benefits in other areas) vs standard antibiotics, I could care less. Put up or shut up....