Cocks has found that the mother’s milk contains a molecule that is 100 times more effective against Gram-negative bacteria such as E. coli than the most potent form of penicillin. The molecule, called AGG01, also kills four types of Gram-positive bacteria and one type of fungus. The work was presented at the US Biotechnology Industry Organization 2006 meeting in Chicago last week.
Category Archives: Health Care
Antibiotic Discovery Stagnates
Bad Bugs, No Drugs As Antibiotic Discovery Stagnates . . . A Public Health Crisis Brews by the Infectious Diseases Society of America. The site includes a 37 page white paper.
A multi-pronged approach is needed to limit the impact of antibiotic resistance on patients and the public. These efforts include educating physicians, patients, and parents about the appropriate use of antibiotics, developing and applying infection control and immunization policies and practices to prevent transmission, surveying clinical and prescription data, and developing safer alternatives to antibiotic uses in agriculture.
The purpose of this document, however, is to call attention to a frightening twist in the antibiotic resistance problem that has not received adequate attention from federal policymakers: The pharmaceutical pipeline for new antibiotics is drying up.
Facts About Antibiotic Resistance:
The total cost of antimicrobial resistance to U.S. society is nearly $5 billion annually, according to the Institute of Medicine (IOM). Treating resistant pathogens often requires more expensive drugs and extended hospital stays.
More on the overuse of antibiotics – which creates drug resistance
Previous posts on antibiotics
Nanospheres Targeting Cancer at MIT
Single-Shot Chemo – Nanospheres that target cancer cells and gradually release drugs could make treatment safer and more effective
Photo – Three prostate cancer cells have taken up fluorescently labeled nanoparticles (shown in red). The cells’ nuclei and cytoskeletons are stained blue and green, respectively. By Omid Farokhzad and Robert Langer at MIT.
A key to the nanoparticles’ effectiveness is the ability of their RNA strands to bind to a cancer cell membrane. The cell then pulls the particles inside. Having the particles inside the cell has two advantages: it gets the drug where it needs to be to kill the cells, and it decreases the concentration of the drug outside the cancer cells, thereby decreasing toxicity to healthy tissue. The fact that the polymer releases the drug gradually also helps — the drug is released over the hours or days it takes for the particles to be pulled into cells, where it continues to be released, killing the cells.
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Eventually, the MIT-Harvard researchers hope to design nanoparticles that can be injected into the bloodstream, from which they could seek out cancer cells anywhere in the body, making it possible to treat late-stage metastasized cancer. “Even though this represents a small percentage of patients that actually have the disease, these are the ones that have no therapeutic option available to them,” Farokhzad says.
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Eventually, the MIT-Harvard researchers hope to design nanoparticles that can be injected into the bloodstream, from which they could seek out cancer cells anywhere in the body, making it possible to treat late-stage metastasized cancer. “Even though this represents a small percentage of patients that actually have the disease, these are the ones that have no therapeutic option available to them,” Farokhzad says.
Singapore woos top scientists with new labs
Singapore woos top scientists with new labs, research money by Paul Elias:
Singapore’s siren song is growing increasingly more irresistible for scientists, especially stem cell researchers who feel stifled by the U.S. government’s restrictions on their field.
Two prominent California scientists are the latest to defect to the Asian city-state, announcing earlier this month that they, too, had fallen for its glittering acres of new laboratories outfitted with the latest gizmos.
They weren’t the first defections, and Singapore officials at the Biotechnology Organization’s annual convention in Chicago this week promise they won’t be the last.
Other Asian countries, including Japan, South Korea and even China, are also here touting their burgeoning biotechnology spending to the 20,000 scientists and biotechnology executives attending the conference.
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In all, the country has managed to recruit about 50 senior scientists — far short of what it needs, but a start for a tiny country of 4.5 million people off the tip of Malaysia.
Another 1,800 younger scientists from all corners of the world staff the Biopolis laboratories, which were built with $290 million in government funding and another $400 million in private investment by the two dozen biotechnology companies based there. Biopolis opened in 2003 and contains seven buildings spread over 10 acres and connected by sky bridges
Nobel Laureate Discusses Protein Power
Nobel Laureate discusses protein power – Podcast
Nobel Laureate Professor Robert Huber visited the The University of Queensland – Brisbane to discuss the future of biomedicine.
He presented the studies that earned him the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1988 and discussed the future of protein crystallography to reduce several diseases such as influenza and cancer.
$1 Million Each for 20 Science Educators
Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Names 20 New Million-Dollar Professors – Top Research Scientists Tapped for their Teaching Talent:
“The scientists whom we have selected are true pioneers—not only in their research, but in their creative approaches and dedication to teaching,” said Thomas R. Cech, HHMI president. “We are hopeful that their educational experiments will energize undergraduate science education throughout the nation.”
The Institute awarded $20 million to the first group of HHMI professors in 2002 to bring the excitement of scientific discovery to the undergraduate classroom.
The experiment worked so well that neurobiologist and HHMI professor Darcy Kelley convinced Columbia University to require every entering freshman to take a course on hot topics in science. Through Utpal Bannerjee’s HHMI program at the University of California, Los Angeles, 138 undergraduates were co-authors of a peer-reviewed article in a top scientific journal. At the University of Pittsburgh, HHMI professor Graham Hatfull’s undergraduates mentored curious high school students as they unearthed and analyzed more than 30 never-before-seen bacteriophages from yards and barnyards. And Isiah Warner, an award-winning chemist and HHMI professor at Louisiana State University, developed a “mentoring ladder,” a hierarchical model for integrating research, education, and peer mentoring, with a special emphasis on underrepresented minority students.
Nanotech Product Recalled in Germany
Nanotech Product Recalled in Germany by Rick Weiss
At least 77 people reported severe respiratory problems over a one-week period at the end of March — including six who were hospitalized with pulmonary edema, or fluid in the lungs — after using a “Magic Nano” bathroom cleansing product, according to the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment in Berlin.
Symptoms generally cleared up within 18 hours, though some had persistent breathing problems for days.
On Nanotechnology in general:
Studies of health effects have just begun in several countries, and regulatory agencies are still formulating their stances, but hundreds of nano products are already for sale.
It was unclear yesterday what kind of nanomaterial is in the spray, or even whether the particles were to blame. Every case has involved the aerosol spray-can form (the product was previously available in a pump bottle, without complications). And the propellant used in the aerosol has long been used uneventfully in hair sprays and other products.
Are Antibiotics Killing Us?
Are Antibiotics Killing Us? by Jessica Snyder Sachs:
To counteract these killers, some physicians have turned to lengthy or lifelong courses of antibiotics. At the same time, other researchers are counterintuitively finding that bacteria we think are bad for us also ward off other diseases and keep us healthy. Using antibiotics to tamper with this complicated and little-understood population could irrevocably alter the microbial ecology in an individual and accelerate the spread of drug-resistant genes to the public at large.
Articles on the overuse of antibiotics.
Salyers says her research shows that decades of antibiotic use have bred a frightening
degree of drug resistance into our intestinal flora. The resistance is harmless as long as the bacteria remain confined to their normal habitat. But it can prove deadly when those bacteria contaminate an open wound or cause an infection after surgery.
Related posts:
Organs Engineered in a Lab
Straight Out of Science Fiction: Organs Engineered in a Lab:
Several years after receiving new bladders engineered entirely in a laboratory, seven young patients are all still healthy.
It marks the first long-term success of total-organ tissue regeneration, an area of medicine that until now was more the stuff of science fiction than clinical reality.
UW-Madison Scientist Solves Bird Flu Puzzler
UW-Madison scientist solves bird flu puzzler by David Wahlberg:
Before the H5N1 virus can cause a human pandemic, the new findings suggest, it must mutate and become able to recognize human flu virus receptors, Kawaoka said.
The virus, which has led to the death or slaughter of millions of birds in Asia, Africa and Europe, has killed 103 of the 184 people known to be infected since 2003, nearly all of them thought to be sickened by birds.
If the virus starts spreading from person to person, health officials say, it could cause a pandemic like the one in 1918 that killed up to 50 million people worldwide.