Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Cincinnatus
|
Yes, these are pretty cool, although they are not new. With methicillin-resistant Staph aureus (MRSA aka "flesh eating bacteria) and "super" TB such emerging problems these little peptides are being fast-tracked for development.
The naturally occurring ones are really ancient molecules. Geneticists speculate that they were the original weapons that single-celled organisms used against each other billions of years ago, and all living things - including humans - still retain them in their genes to this day. Some of these molecules are used as immune messengers in our bodies -- part of the cytokine system. (Weirdly enough, massive amounts of these normally-good molecules might be part of the "cytokine storm" that the H5N1 flu seems to bring about.)
That's what's slowing down their development. Dicking around with the cytokine system can have catastrophic consequences, and rats/dogs/monkeys use different molecules than us so animal testing doesn't give the usual clues regarding safety. You don't want to be the first human they pump this stuff into. Maybe you heard about the six guys in the UK who puffed up like frogs and had multiple organ failure after being injected with millionths of a gram of a cytokine regulator. One has leukemia now.
Another cool new/old treatment is bacteriophage therapy. Bacteriophages are viruses that attack and kill only bacteria. They look like little mortar rounds with whiskers coming off the tail. The Soviets were decades ahead of the rest of the world in the 40's but antibiotics kinda ended the party for them. They had developed different strains of these viruses that they'd inject into people to fight specific infections.
You may have heard that they are spraying lunch meat with viruses now. Those are bacteriophages that kill common bacterial contaminants on meat.