The world is on the cusp of a "post-antibiotic era", scientists have warned after finding bacteria resistant to drugs used when all other treatments have failed. http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34857015
Once this happens in a few years time the death rate will soar to huge new highs, medical operations will be so risky as not to be worthwhile. About time the drug companies made this a high priority imho
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-new-antibiotic-teixobactin-20150106-story.html Bacteria have been fighting each other for billions of years before we arrived, so environmental microbes are a rich source of potential new antibiotics. The problem is that 99 percent of them won’t grow in lab conditions. So, why not bring the environment into the lab? That’s what the iChip does. It’s just a board with several holes in it. The team fill the holes by collecting soil, shaking it in water to release any microbes, heavily diluting the sample, mixing it with liquid agar, and pouring the agar into the iChip. The dilution ensures that each hole, now plugged by a disc of solid agar, contains just one bacterial cell. They then covered the discs in permeable membranes and dunked the whole board into a beaker of the original soil. The microbes are constrained to the agar, but they can still soak up nutrients, growth factors, and everything else they need from their natural environment. And thus, the ungrowable grows. “We have access to things that haven’t been seen before,” says Lewis. “The method has the potential to be truly transformative, giving us access to a much greater diversity of environmental bacteria than previously imagined,” says Gautam Dantas from Washington University in St Louis. Among these new microbes, the team found one species that kills staph bacteria efficiently. It belongs to an entirely new genus and is part of a group that’s not known for making antibiotics. They called it Eleftheria terrae. It yielded a compound—teixobactin—that could kill important rogues like the bacteria behind anthrax and tuberculosis, and Clostridium difficile (which causes severe diarrhoea). The team exposed some of these microbes to low levels of teixobactin for several weeks, to see if resistant strains would evolve. None did. “I thought: Aw, damn it,” says Lewis. “We discovered a detergent.” Counter-intuitively, if you see a total lack of resistance, it usually means that you’ve discovered a compound so toxic that it’s never going to work in an actual human. Hence: Lewis’s dismay. But when his team applied the drug to mammalian cells, it wasn’t toxic at all. It seemed safe, stable in blood, and capable of protecting mice from lethal doses of MRSA (drug-resistant staph). Things were looking up. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------