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from the little-fleas-have-lesser-fleas-upon-their-backs-to-bite-them... dept.
Researchers at Imperial College London and the University of Nottingham have found a novel way of killing harmful bacteria that cause infection — setting predator bacteria loose to eat the harmful ones.
Experiments showed a dose of Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus acted like a "living antibiotic" to help clear an otherwise lethal infection.
The animal studies, published in Current Biology , suggested there would be no side effects.
[...] Dr Michael Chew, from the Wellcome Trust medical research body, said: "It may be unusual to use a bacterium to get rid of another, but in the light of the looming threat from drug-resistant infections the potential of beneficial bacteria-animal interactions should not be overlooked.
"We are increasingly relying on last-line antibiotics, and this innovative study demonstrates how predatory bacteria could be an important additional tool to drugs in the fight against resistance."
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 28 2016, @11:50AM
setting predator bacteria loose to eat the harmful ones.
What could go wrong? After all, introducing a new species to control an unwanted one always worked so well.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 28 2016, @12:04PM
Don't worry, the gorillas will freeze to death.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 28 2016, @01:33PM
At best, that would establish a new food chain hierarchy:
Pathogenic bacteria draw their strength from utilizing host's tissue as their food, but predatory bacteria would have a lot less provisions on their side, unless they too become pathogenic. So, predatory species never completely eradicate their food source, they only tend to keep them at level sufficient for their own subsistence.
Because of that, none of "natural enemy" ideas would work perfect. Another approach would be "dead weight" approach: to introduce some very efficient but benign saprophyte bacteria which would steal food before pathogens' figurative noses faster then the dangerous toxin-secreting bugs could lap up what their toxins teared down. I believe that "wound cleaning worms" therapy does exactly that: worms eating food of bacteria before bacteria get to eat it up, hurting their rate of reproduction - the rate of turning our flesh into more bacteria. The same approach could be used on a microscopic level. In fact, don't we have our own kind of leukocytes to do such a mop-up? Perhaps we could boost them up somehow?
Antibiotics are a good idea, but we would need to pick another winner of microbe mortal combat contest every season. However, our way of fighting bacteria would render useless any means we can get:
Out in the wild, natural antibiotics are never used to corner and attempt to extinct any particular microbe; they are used to deter competition and create isolated private spaces for their wielders.
Then, human medical researchers come along, they isolate, analyze, and produce, in global-biosphere-significant quantity, what was essentially some organism's secret super-weapon of last resort, and force all microbes on Earth to learn the new ropes to survive. I guess that original natural source of the chemical just goes extinct after they do learn the new ropes.
We need to make antibiotics very, very expensive just to make them work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 28 2016, @02:57PM
If it doesn't work, doctors can always advise patients to drink hard liquor to kill the predator bacteria. Of course, some patients have already taken this course of action on their own.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Francis on Monday November 28 2016, @03:17PM
That's a potentially serious problem with this approach. We as a species have had a rather poor track record of changing food chains to fit our whims. I'm not sure why we would expect to do better by introducing one at the microscopic level than removing ones at the macroscopic level.
There's tons of ways in which this could go wrong, including wiping out the wrong species, the species mutating in a way that causes us harm or the species taking on abilities that weren't there to begin with.
At some point, they need to just stop. The bacteria theory is what's causing these problems and the resulting lunacy. If they're concerned with super-bacteria, we already have narrow band antibiotics in the form of phages that can do that job safely without damaging the other bacteria. What's more, if we stopped killing all the bacteria we find, the super-bacteria wouldn't be created at such an alarming rate and when created, they'd have to actually compete for resources rather than start with a largely clean growing medium.