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 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.