2014.08.17 04:31
* World crying out for new antibiotics as superbugs evolve * Scientists seek new chemistry in hard-to-reach places "Back to nature" search aided by genome mining technology By Kate Kelland and Ben Hirschler NORWICH,
The quest is urgent. Africa provides a glimpse of what the world looks like when the drugs we rely on to fight disease and prevent infections after operations stop working.
"It's a good time to be researching antibiotics because there are a lot of new avenues to explore," said Christophe Corre, a Royal Society research fellow in the department of chemistry at the University of Warwick. EXTREME LOCATIONS, SMART TECHNIQUES Marcel Jaspars, a professor of organic chemistry at Britain's University of Aberdeen, is leading a dive deep into the unknown to search for bacteria that have, quite literally, never before seen the light of day. With 9.5 million euros ($12.7 million) of European Union funding, Jaspars launched a project called PharmaSea in which he and a team of international researchers will haul samples of mud and sediment from deep sea trenches in the Pacific Ocean, the Arctic waters around Norway, and then the Antarctic.
Cubicin, an injectable antibiotic sold by U.S.-based Cubist , was first isolated from a microbe found in soil collected on Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey.
Yet as Jaspars says: "It's not just about going to extreme locations, it's now also about using smart techniques." Modern gene-sequencing machines mean it is now possible to read microbial DNA quickly and cheaply, opening up a new era of "genome mining", which has reignited interest in seeking drug leads in the natural world. It marks a significant change.
The problem is they just don't have the natural diversity of compounds that have evolved over billions of years as defence mechanisms for wild bacteria and fungi. "We need new scaffolds, new structures and that is what natural products bring," Corre says.
China's BGI, for example, one of the world's biggest genomics centres, is sequencing thousands of different bacteria, and similar work at other labs is adding to a mountain of data for scientists to work through. It also provides insights into how antibiotic resistance occurs, with researchers at Britain's Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute this month reporting a new way to identify such gene changes, potentially paving the way to more targeted treatments.
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2014.08.17 12:44
2014.08.17 17:06
We have been in constant war with all kind of living organisms, big and small, for millions of years.
The big animals are no more threat to us but the tiny creatures like virus, we still do not know how to fight
them off. Time will be on our side, I hope, with our intelligence.
But, what about our own brothers? Never ending wars on this planet.
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This is indeed quite a story that should inspire young medical students who want contribute something significant to mankind.
Once again all of us realize how much we owe to the dedicated medical scientists who discovered sulfa drugs, penicillin,
streptomycin, and the many, many antibiotics, all of us take for granted.
If I may share my personal experience of my childhood, I remember the day one of my younger brothers died at five or so of
pneumonia and how heart broken my mother was. My brother was treated with herb medicines. I believe it was in 1949 or so.
Of course we didn't have antibiotics then, particularly in the country side.
The other happy ending story is that my late oldest sister, 12 years older than I, was dying of advanced pulmonary tuberculosis
with daily, large amounts of hemoptysis in 1953 when I was 13.
My mother and I took her on our backs and walked some 5 kilometers to a US army hospital as a last desperate measure.
US army doctors took her and kept her in their hospital bed for one hundred days.
My sister received streptomycin shots every day. She recovered and lived to be 85 and died last year.
I heard the word streptomycin for the first time at age 13.
Whoever discovered the streptomycin, it saved my sister's life.
If my younger brother had received antibiotics as our kids are routinely treated nowadays, he would have lived, I believe.