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posted by martyb on Tuesday April 18 2017, @06:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the a-solution-surfaces dept.

Inspired by viruses that attack and kill bacteria, researchers at The Rockefeller University have created an entirely new weapon against disease-causing bacteria that shows great promise for treating drug-resistant infections.

In work described in the Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences on April 17, the team engineered molecules that accomplish something viruses do much better than the human immune system; namely, targeting specific carbohydrate molecules that appear on the surfaces of bacterial cells.

"Bacteria-infecting viruses have molecules that recognize and tightly bind to these common components of the bacterial cell's surface that the human immune system largely misses. We have co-opted these molecules, and we've put them to work helping the human immune system fight off microbial pathogens," says Vincent A. Fischetti, head of the Laboratory of Bacterial Pathogenesis and Immunology.

In experiments with mice, Fischetti's team used this approach to successfully treat life-threatening infections by MRSA, a bacterium that is resistant to conventional antibiotics—results that suggest they may have found a new way to fight superbugs like MRSA.


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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 19 2017, @02:03AM

    by kaszz (4211) on Wednesday April 19 2017, @02:03AM (#496108) Journal

    This approach is old, the results are not. What remains is to make a product out of it.

    There are three approaches to getting rid of various drug resistant bacteria:
      * Engineered virus that infect bacteria (as in the article)
      * Macrophages, bacteria that eat other bacteria.
      * Chemical signal disruption by misleading the signals between hostile bacteria.

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