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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Gram-negative bacteria like the Klebsiella pneumoniae... have an outer membrane that makes them impervious to many drugs, but a new compound from Genentech can breach the border and cripple them.
[...] A team led by evolutionary biologist Peter Smith at Genentech, the biotech pioneer in South San Francisco, California, began with a class of natural compounds called arylomycins. Various arylomycins can penetrate the outer membrane of gram-negatives, but they have trouble binding to their target, an enzyme embedded in the inner membrane that juts into the space between the inner and outer walls. So Smith and colleagues chemically modified an arylomycin to "systematically optimize" it such that the drug could more easily reach that space—and bind to the enzyme.
The molecule they created, dubbed G0775, was at least 500 times more potent than a naturally found arylomycin against some of the biggest gram-negative bacterial threats to humans, including Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Acinetobacter baumannii. What's more, it remained potent against all 49 isolates of multidrug-resistant forms of these bacteria that the researchers obtained from patients. In a coup de grâce, when tested against a notoriously drug-resistant strain of K. pneumoniae that has defied 13 different classes of antibiotics, G0775 walloped the bacterium in lab dish experiments, they report today in Nature. "We're really excited," Smith says. "We've made the necessary changes to the molecules so that they can hit the real deal."
G0775 also showed in mice it could stymie infections from six strains of four different gram-negative bacteria. It also hasn't exhibited any potential toxicities in mammalian cells. But the road to antibiotic approval is littered with compounds that later proved toxic in larger animals or during early human trials—or that simply failed to retain their potency.
doi:10.1126/science.aav4019
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 15 2018, @02:24AM (3 children)
Actually, if you study epidemiology a bit, you will come to understand that the more successful creatures do not kill the host or at least do not kill the host too quickly.
This is because once the host is dead, the "bugs" no longer have a place they can live and reproduce. Yes there are some exceptions to this, but as a rule a successful pathogen "wants" not to kill the host but to keep the host alive so the host is able to infect new hosts.
Read the excellent book "The Hot Zone" if you want to learn more about this. It's an older book now but the writing is superb and the story is true yet is one
of the most frightening stories I have ever read.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 15 2018, @07:15AM
no-see-ums are very good at this
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Saturday September 15 2018, @01:37PM
I'm happy you put "wants" in quotes. Because these pathogens don't have desires or minds, but it is a quick short-hand to describe to some degree what is happening. Although, I think in general this type of description is retarding the public understanding of the world.
Pathogens that do not kill the host quickly are able to better utilize the resources of the host and multiply, giving them an evolutionary edge. Pathogens that kill the host more quickly are out-competed by the slow killers. Therefore slow-killers are more prevalent in the current environment and distribution of hosts. The pathogens do not "want" anything. Simply, those that kill more slowly have an advantage and therefore are more common. This isn't by design, or due to some intrinsic desire, plan, or purpose. It simply is the most economical way to extract usefulness from the host and to multiply in the most effective way.
Nature is a cold, ruthless numbers game where the rules are constantly changing and massive amounts of chaos are injected daily.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 15 2018, @03:05PM
Counterexample: clostridia. They're soil bacteria, and prefer their nutrient source nicely lying down and getting one with the soil. Cue tetanus, botulism, gas gangrene, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clostridium [wikipedia.org]