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.
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You're suggesting I couldn't get a small business loan to set up an anti-biowarfare laboratory?
Re:"Aimed at small businesses" (Score:5, Informative)
It's probably not hooey.
DARPA tends to put blue-sky stuff like this into SBIR [osd.mil] (Small Business Innovation Research). You'd be amazed at what comes out of these grants.
Disclaimer: In a previous job, I worked for a company that did work under SBIR.
Re:"Aimed at small businesses" (Score:4, Informative)
As mentioned above, they really do want small businesses.
The big companies might have some extra money to toss at a problem, but they won't without good chances for return.
In this case "small businesses" translates roughly to "those crazy enough to risk economic ruin when they fail".
*note* I realize this post sounds a little negative, that is not the intent. I love DARPA and out of the grants they award has come some truly stunning stuff.
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Having worked for a company that made its bread and butter off SBIR development, you're talking out of your ass.
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Oh, he's just starting from the religious tenent that "all rich peoplem, and all corporations, are evil and can do nothing but evil". Of course he doesn't make sense if you don't share his faith.
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Oh, he's just starting from the religious tenent that "all rich peoplem, and all corporations, are evil and can do nothing but evil". Of course he doesn't make sense if you don't share his faith.
Ouch, that hurt.
I don't think ALL rich people or ALL corps are evil. Evil doesn't even enter into it.
I was responding to the post further up the chain that suggested that running a startup on government funding was to risk financial ruin. That would be the case if you are using your own funding and borrowing on your own credit such that a failure would result in personal bankruptcy. However, I think the more typical scenario is to set up an LLC or an S-Corp so that you can walk away if your corp goes
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The extremes are rarely representative. Typically when a small business is set up as a scam to milk government funding, it's intended as such from the start and has very little actual substance (IMO Solyndra was like that, or at least it seemed so driving by the empyt factories every day before the scandal broke). Sure, that happens - probably a lot these days in the modern era of corporate bailouts.
But the majority are a small businessman hoping to win the lottery, very much out on a limb with personal f
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Oddly enough, as long as someone is doing innovative R&D, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. In large organizations, promising R&D is often killed because of the "needing to be all things to all people" syndrome or, due to it being disruptive technology, because it has a chance to displace existing (and profitable) products. And, frankly, the purchase of a company whose innovative R&D shows promise is often a more certain payoff than trying to grow that business. Finally, most large organizatio
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That and employees are no longer valued they're viewed as an expense. Most of these small businesses are developing ideas from ex-employees who weren't valued adequately and have started a new company to develop their idea.
Companies like Apple spend millions re-buying what probably could have been kept in house if the employees had been given a fat raise and recognition.
Then again there is such a lack of vision and creativity in management today I don't really trust most companies to recognize their valua
"Aimed at ... might be on target " (Score:2)
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and all three [landscapers] lost their busineses because local government banned watering
This is not a logical reason for landscapers to lose business. Xeriscaping requires nearly as much upkeep as lawns. As municipalities all over the U.S. move away from watered lawns, landscapers are seeing a boom, both of new/changing xeriscape and on maintenance contracts.
Landscaping and watering... (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder if they weren't so much 'landscapers' as 'fancy lawnmowers' and failed to adapt?
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No, the two trucks were tree pullers-haulers, and his business was similar to the other two. Most of the landscaping was for newly constructed properties. If you've ever transplanted a tree, even a sapling, you know it takes a lot of water -- and the local government didn't seem to care about the economic repercussions.
When we had a drought here in central Illinois a decade or so ago, no such restrictions were put on businesses. You could wash your car, but only at a commercial car wash. You couldn't water
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Why still delivering medicine? (Score:2)
nanomolecules that can specifically target cells and deliver medicine to them anywhere in the body
Instead of delivering medicine, why not make them carry some sort of nano weapon to destroy the target cells?
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.
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Re:Why still delivering medicine? (Score:5, Interesting)
My own company has developed a small catalyst that can be covalently bound to a targeting molecule. When released into the bloodstream, the catalyst gathers around the targeted cells and catalyzes the production of superoxide, which directly oxidizes the cell membrane. If you target virulence factors, or certain vital proteins in the membrane, there is no method by which they can develop immunity. Either they evolve to no longer have virulence factors (and are thus no longer a problem), or they have to change their entire membrane structure to an as yet unseen one that resists oxidative damage while still allowing water in, which would make it not only a new species, but a new kingdom.
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However because those antibiotics depend on difference in the cell structure between human cells and the bacteria cells the bacteria can effectively evolve to be more like human cells in that regard (in general if
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If only we could develop a device that targets the cells and delivers peroxide to destroy them... somehow it sounds familiar.
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The medicine is a nenoweapon -- against the infected cells.
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don't update until the first patch comes out
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Why do people think so much inside the box and reach so low?
Probably because they're being far more realistic than you are.
For one thing, our own immune systems can already "upgrade" themselves - that's how vaccines work.
We can't even fully secure our computers, so how do you expect us to be able to secure our own immune system against real viruses? And even if we do develop an upgraded immune system that is immune to all known viruses and harmful bacteria, what happens when some of our white-listed bacteria (some bacteria in our bodies are symbiotic to an extent, s
The Future (Score:5, Funny)
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Except this is really pointless, such a cure already exists and has been in development for years. If you eat beef in the US there's a good chance you've already consumed bacteriophages. One of the happy consequences of the break up of the USSR was that the Georgian government had massive biological weapons labs with nothing to do with them, they ultimately were used for research.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriophage [wikipedia.org]
The results so far have been quite impressive.
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The results so far have been quite impressive.
Really? For all the jumping up and down from the bacteriophage is great community, I've yet to see a commercial product or system.
Got any examples?
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Correct, the problem presently is that if you're going to use it as medicine in the US, you would have to go through trials for each and every strain that the doctors wanted to use. Now that's normally a reasonable way to approach things, however these are rapidly evolving and you're not going to find a strain that kills the desired bacteria, but hurts the patient.
Re:The Future (Score:4, Interesting)
.
If it was good enough for Feynman, it's good enough for me.
And what is a phage but a biological nanomachine dedicated to killing bacteria, anyway?
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Doing my undergrad I would daily walk past some fairly macabre before and after photos of the treatments. A blackened foot which normally would have been removed and an after photo of the same foot that had been treated. The process was rather simple, cut the foot wide open and slather the correct strain of phage allowing for the drainage after the fact.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2095089/ [nih.gov]
http://blogs.evergreen.edu/phage/ [evergreen.edu]
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I do have to disagree there, the pharmaceutical companies would love to get out of the antibiotic market, there's very little profit there and the more doses they sell the less future doses are worth. Antibiotics are something they make mainly for the benefit of humanity.
The main reason why they mostly dropped it is that there's very little money to pay for the research and it's extremely expensive under the current regulatory environment to work with it. They would be shelling out literally billions per do
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This is a technology I'd be happier if nobody had.
However, that obviously isn't going to happen....
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MAXIMUM IMMUNITY
The early death of antibiotics (Score:5, Informative)
This is not a matter of educating the public. The public has been educated yet they ignore it. I have never understood where this profound ignorance comes from. This is a major hot button for me.
Past all that, if any organization can formulate something new and better I suppose that would be DARPA.
Re:The early death of antibiotics (Score:5, Informative)
I far bigger issue then singular humans mistaking antibiotics is the universal use by the farming industry on animals.
Mod this person up! (Score:2)
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http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199306173282418 [nejm.org]
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Would have made little difference in the long run. If you use antibiotics, you will get resistant organisms. Same thing with siRNA, bacteriophages or whatnot.
It's called evolutionary pressure. It it doesn't much care about you....
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If you use antibiotics, you will get resistant organisms. Same thing with siRNA, bacteriophages or whatnot
Only if your antibiotic or replacement only kills most of the bacteria. We haven't seen bacteria become resistant to neat chlorine, for example. Evolution isn't magic.
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Even if whatever is only killing 'most' of the bacteria it's not guaranteed or even necessarily possible for said organism to evolve a mechanism to survive.
Agreed, evolution isn't magic.
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It's like saying that Little Johnny got a cold, so now he is immune to all viruses.
Further, current antibiotics lead to resistance only because they act as poisons, and must get into the cell, and stick around long enough to do their damage. They can be pumped out. If you have a material that attacks the membrane, then you can't breed resistance. Not without a sudden dramatic leap to a new ty
Re:The early death of antibiotics (Score:4, Informative)
Find me a species of bacteria that can develop an immunity to direct oxidation of its membrane. Just one. Such an organism could live in fire, and swim in bleach. Evolution isn't magic, and poison is different from fire. You can become immune to poison, but only in fiction can you become immune to fire while remaining alive. Oxidative attack is the molecular equivalent of fire, the only difference is you don't get persistent plasma off of wet oxidation.
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Some things do not care about evolutionary pressure.
Humanity can not evolve a biological defense against a bullet to the brain.
A cell can not evolve a biological defense against having its cell wall shredded by an oxidizing agent.
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Humanity can not evolve a biological defense against a bullet to the brain.
Oh, yeah?
I guess you've never heard of Wolverine, then. Hello: mutant! Mutant = EVOLUTION.
"Among the more extreme depictions of Wolverine's healing factor include fully healing after being caught near the center of an atomic explosion." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolverine_(comics) [wikipedia.org] )
So, bullet to the brain, no problem.
You Misunderstand What I Meant by "Grand Scheme" (Score:2)
It is massively unfortunate that antibiotics have fallen due to misuse. By all means the *should* be viable for decades to come ...
Decades? When you look at the power of evolution over time -- and I mean time as in evolutionary time -- it is simply amazing and a "solution" like antibiotics is no more than a very brief band-aid. I'm not in the medical fields but as the population of humans on this planet skyrockets, we become more and more vulnerable to just being massive petri-dishes waiting for that one antibacterial resistant strain. From the definition of antibiotics [wikipedia.org]:
The term antibiotic was coined by Selman Waksman in 1942 to describe any substance produced by a microorganism that is antagonistic to the growth of other microorganisms in high dilution.
In the evolutionary sense, these antibiotics are merely one mor
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It is massively unfortunate that antibiotics have fallen due to misuse. By all means the *should* be viable for decades to come, but that has been ruined by ignorance. ... This is not a matter of educating the public. The public has been educated yet they ignore it. I have never understood where this profound ignorance comes from. This is a major hot button for me.
Well, I don't know where in the world you may live, but here in the US, it's fairly clear what has happened. The religious crowd has campaigned long and hard against "evolution", and they have pretty much succeeded in eliminating the word and the concept from our educations system. Thus, if you pay attention to news stories about drug resistance, it is always something that micro-organisms develop or acquire; it is hardly ever something that they evolve. The media does this partly out of fear of religio
They don't have to be temporary (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is overuse - factory farming is unsustainable for this reason alone, but putting an end to high density meat production and doing a better job with limiting antibiotic use among humans would not only stop the development of antibiotic resistance, it would reverse the process. Evolution cuts both ways, bacteria may evolve a resistance to antibiotics but they give something up in the process. If you remove the stimulus then, given time, the process will reverse.
Of course, ending factory farming would mean more expensive meat (i.e. big government nanny-state), but more importantly would cut into the profits of a few certain companies. So DARPA comes up with this instead.
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Oh stop. Yes, we shouldn't feed tetracycline to chickens (or corn to cows for that matter). No, it doesn't change things. Neither will nanoThis or nanoThat - you are just putting pressure on the organism to 'come up' with workarounds.
The big problem with nanoThis and nanoThat will be differentiating 'good' from 'bad'. People have been trying targeted molecules of many sorts (for cancer, mostly) for decades with little success. Past failures, of course, do not argue against future success but it's not l
Evolution doesn't do that.... (Score:3)
Evolution cuts both ways, bacteria may evolve a resistance to antibiotics but they give something up in the process. If you remove the stimulus then, given time, the process will reverse.
Not exactly. The bacteria evolved their resistance genes under extremely intense selection pressures. Novel antibiotics are the hydrogen bombs of the microbiology world. The bacteria survived in a given person because there are quintillions of them, reproducing dozens of times per day. Their natural mutation rate brute forced a genetic solution to the problem.
However, genetic drift (the process by which genes could disappear at the population or species level when they're not under any selection pressur
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Think of it as giving the bacteria an allergic reaction. Those that exhibit the immunity will waste an appreciable amount of energy, putting pressure against that particular immunity gene.
Then you're only creating a population of bacteria with a workaround for both your antibiotic and your (extremely hypothetical and circuitous) induced 'allergy'.
Seriously. Bacteria. Octillions of them. You simply can't follow the rabbit hole far enough to catch all the of the combinations of genes they'll come up with for dealing with your attacks, counter-attacks, trojan horses, etc. Human tactics simply do not work, and I'd actually bet my life that they never will.
You really do seem to understand s
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I see this particular argument on most threads that deals with evolution. While I applaud slashdot for generally understanding that evolution doesn't 'foresee' anything or optimize for every situation or come without drawbacks, it's an irrational conclusion that evolution always comes with drawbacks or that it can never m
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Of course, ending factory farming would mean more expensive meat (i.e. big government nanny-state), but more importantly would cut into the profits of a few certain companies.
Only if you buy meat at the grocery store in meal sized quantities for a family of 4. My dad and I split 1/4 of a cow and 1/4 of a bison each year as one of my dad's friends raises cattle (10 to 12 on 40 acres) and one of my step-mom's friends raises bison (5 on 40 acres). This year the beef cost $3.41 a pound and the bison was $3.74 a pound which I believe is still cheaper than even the worst ground beef (I saw some 75% lean ground beef a while ago that was almost $4 a pound) but that price includes ground
Phage therapy helps in 80% of infections (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Phages giveth and phages taketh away (Score:2)
Of course, some bacteriophages actually produce virulence factors when they infect bacteria (e.g. Diptheria: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diptheria#Mechanism [wikipedia.org])
If there is one thing the FSM has taught us humans is that beer volcanoes are awesome. If there are two things the FSM has taught us, it is that nature finds a way. Or maybe that was Jurassic Park. Hmmm...
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Well, a few things to keep in mind. One is that phages are very specific to their hosts (like a antibiotic with a super-narrow spectrum of activity), and two similar strains of bacteria can have very different phage susceptibility profiles. In an epidemic (such as a Cholera outbreak), you are likely facing all one strain, but for community infections you will need to a large library of phages, which requires considerable expertise to maintain and use. On the plus side, you can avoid collateral damage to
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....
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.
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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.
You are underestimating the mutation rate of bacteria, as vertical inheritance is not the only mechanism for mutations. Look up Horizontal (or Lateral) Gene Transfer. Living cells can acquire genes from other cells. In bacteria, it was measured at one successful transfer per generation (in E. Coli). Genes can be acquired from environment, through plasmids, injected by viruses, recombined with other bacteria (a.k.a. bacterial sex), etc. Transfer doesn't have to be from the same species (whatever definition
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And I have to start thinking about how I'm going to bathe my house in chlorine gas every few months.
SURPRISE! (Score:4, Interesting)
I just love the mission of DARPA:
"DARPA’s mission is to prevent technological surprise for the United States and to create technological surprise for its adversaries."
It's the closest thing we've got to a science fiction agency or MIB (the first good movie at least). Too bad I'm not smart enough to work there. (The company I was at did get its basic technology for image compression fom DARPA, now that technology and variations on it, are used in movie theaters around the world.)
Returning to the subject: their goal seems crazy ambitious (defeat 3.5 billion years of bacterial evolution?). Still, I heard of a project at MIT where researchers had shown (in mice) a technique which would defeat just about ALL virusis (they tried it on dengue, influenza, H1N1). So who knows? Still, gotta be just a teensy bit worried because a good bio-offense (weapon) depends on a good bio-defense.
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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).
Disappointed (Score:2)
This far and still no Ghost in the Shell SAC references?
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The basis for the series was the actions taken by people promoting a nanomachine treatment of cyberbrain schlerosis and suppressing information regarding the higher rate of success of a traditional vaccine.
silver (Score:2)
Various forms of silver have killed bacteria for a couple thousand years without fail. It is currently used to sanitize hospitals and protect burn injuries. Many take it internally and claim good results.
Unfortunately it's unpatentable and of no interest to corporations.
Re:silver (Score:5, Interesting)
IANAD(octor), but my office is directly across from the department of surgery, and I have had discussions about this with them in the past. Silver is the best thing they have commercially available, but it is terrible. My company is developing better antimicrobials for them--non-leeching ones.
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For internal use it's complete bullshit, and causes awful skin discoloration:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_uses_of_silver#Alternative_medicine [wikipedia.org]
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You might start with a search for colloidal silver. My understanding is that silver ions are suspended in pure water. You can even make your own with some fairly simple items. I understand that the solution deteriorates over time and must be protected from light.
Some take silver daily as a preventative. Others take it for colds or other unusual conditions. There are nasal sprays and I seem to recall eye drops.
Overdose can cause skin to permanently turn grey (Mr. Data syndrome) as someone noted. This seems t
missing tag (Score:2)
I'm amazed that nobody has either tagged or posted WCPGW yet. :-)
Antibiotic cycle (Score:2)
In some parts of Africa, malaria is becoming vulnerable to the oldest drug against it, quinine, again. After quinine use was abandoned because it was ineffectual, malaria apparently got rid of the expensive biochemical hardware needed to deal with quinine.
How about if this works with antibiotics? Stop using penicillin for 20 years, and then it works again?
--PM
Re:no, No, NO!!! (Score:4, Funny)
Who knew?
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I love this. It's right up there with the one about eating muppets - I miss that one.
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The proposed "solution" is even worse than the antibiotics it is intended to replace.
A bacteria modified to attack cancer cells needs only to have its "cancer-only" chromosome modified to "attack-all-cells" which would spell doom for the patient.
The way I read it they have something more like a phage in mind, - something that cannot live or replicate outside the pathogen.
I Love You, Bob (Score:4, Funny)
You are the reason I submit any medical news to Slashdot. Your (Score: -1) batshit insanity brightens my day.
I will take a karma hit to say this: I love you Bob! Keep up the good work fighting the front lines with *snicker* chiropractics in Africa!
eldavojohn
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I mean, nobody is that stupid, right? Right?
I see you've never met my ex-wife, you lucky bastard!
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No, but she's that stupid.
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It's great to see Dr. Bob's mad ravings again. But I'm always a little worried at how many people take him seriously (on both sides). Even if they disagree with chiropractors, surely they have to recognize this as a farce. And the ones that actually agree with him... Yikes!
It sort of reminds me of the anti-evolution seminar my dad made me go to as a kid. They were saying all this crazy stuff about how the bombardier beetle proves the existence of god. It probably wasn't until I was in college that I realize
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By the omission of the line break betwixt and between items 6 and 7, you have invalidated your conclusions.
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Humans are themselves radioactive on about the same scale bananas are. The amount of radiation involved is so small that it's difficult to express, and the "Banana Equivalent Dose" does not account for how your body actually processes potassium. You're on much safer grounds picking on Brazil nuts, which contain barium. However, regardless of whether you choose to eat either foodstuff, there's enough random isotopes in the rest of your diet to account for about ten times the radiation dose you'd get by eatin
Re:no, No, NO!!! (Score:4, Funny)
I would like to correct you, picking a nit, specifically.
Optical radiation (light) doesn't affect my DNA in the slightest. However, it affects me greatly none the less. I cant imagine how many bumps, bruises, scrapes, broken bones and bloody noses I'd have without it!
Thank you, little photons between ~400 and ~750nm for making my life so much easier.
Except when someone on slashdot links to goatse, then I hate you.
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"but neither are hemp clothing"
srsly? hemp clothing is underrated if anything.
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I vote Dr. Bob as chiropractor of the year!
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Ultimately it always comes down to the human wielding it. Which is kinda scary.
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Funny thing is, medicine is synonymous with poison.
No it's not. Farmaca ("drugs") are synonymous with poison, due to the origin of pharmaceutical substances as poisons, taken under the assumption that they would do more damage to the cause of the host problem than they would do damage to the host (and to the damage the cause of the host problem is causing to the host). There are aspects and form of medicine however that are quite distant from this approach.
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Nuke the planetary surface from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Which turned out not to be true.
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There are limits to what evolution can achieve. No bacteria will survive pressure cooking at 300 C in concentrated sodium hydroxide as an example.
There's also the possibility of eradicating a disease before it can evolve into something you cannot treat. Smallpox will never become resistant to the vaccine, because we eradicated it. It cannot evolve if it doesn't ex
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There are limits to what evolution can achieve. No bacteria will survive pressure cooking at 300 C in concentrated sodium hydroxide as an example
I wouldn't be so sure about that - there are some pretty amazing extremophiles out there. But bacteria that can survive in the human body are about as fragile as we are.
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The answer to antibiotic-resistant bugs is to develop *new* and *different* antibiotics. It's that whole diversity thing, y'know? The problem is that Big Pharma is no longer interested in developing drugs that make you better. There's far more money involved in developing drugs that you have to take for the rest of your life. When was the last time you saw a television commercial for an antibiotic? Nope, they'd rather have you on an antidepressant, a cholesterol medicine, a supplement for people whose antidepressants are rendered less effective by their cholesterol medicine, something for the high blood pressure resulting from the previous three medications, and of course something to perk up the old limp noodle from time to time.
Cure sickness? Once? Where's the money in that?
ceftaroline [teflaro.com]
daptomycin [cubicin.com]
linezolid [zyvox.com]
tigecycline [tygacil.com]
fidaxomicin [dificid.com]
telavancin [vibativ.com]
doripenem [doribax.com]
ertapenem [invanz.com]
Oh gee, I don't know. Maybe you simply don't know because ordinary people aren't concerned about curing infections. And pharmaceutical companies understand this with their marketing campaigns. People are more worried about putting their dollars into their mood, their erectile dysfunction, and their botox injections. Have you ever seen a patient walk into an office and write a big check to a cardiologist for a left heart