Word: bacterias
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...current attack against resistant strains is multipronged. Some microbiologists are trying to re-engineer the older generation of miracle drugs to get around the mechanisms of resistance. Tetracycline, which kills bacteria by disabling a cellular structure known as the ribosome, is the target of one such effort. Bacteria become resistant to tetracycline, observes Tufts University microbiologist Dr. Stuart Levy, by deploying one protein that serves to shield the ribosome and another that acts as a molecular pump, forcibly ejecting the antibiotic from the cell. Those insights have spawned a line of tetracycline analogs, against which neither the shield...
Other companies are starting to look for fresh new antimicrobial agents. Cubist, in Cambridge, Mass., has an injectable form of one such agent--daptomycin--in late-stage clinical trials. Like tetracycline, it was derived from filamentous bacteria that dwell in both soil and water. But daptomycin does not work as tetracycline does by inhibiting cellular metabolism. Rather, it disrupts the conformation of the bacterium's cell membrane, more like penicillin. The way daptomycin does this appears to be unique; in other words, the resistance that disease-causing bacteria have developed to penicillin should not readily transfer to daptomycin...
...only lode that drug developers are mining. Linezolid, the novel antibiotic just approved by the FDA, is totally synthetic, and that is a great advantage, believes Pharmacia Corp.'s Dr. Gary Tarpley, who led the team effort that produced the drug. "Because this compound has never been seen by bacteria," he says, "it is extremely unlikely that there is any pre-existing resistance out there." Like tetracycline, linezolid blocks protein synthesis, but it does so much earlier in the cellular cycle. No other antibiotic operates in this fashion, yet another reason to expect resistance to develop more slowly...
...process of discovering antimicrobials should speed up, thanks to the rapid sequencing of the genomes of disease-causing organisms. Among the latest conquests are the bacteria responsible for causing syphilis and leprosy. The genome of the parasite that causes malaria is also beginning to yield its secrets, including the exact genetic mutations that confer chloroquine resistance. Scientists are beginning to exploit what they know about the parasite's life cycle after it invades the red blood cells of the human body. Daniel Goldberg, a malaria researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Md., is trying to figure...
...opposite end of the technology scale, Eldrid Sequeira, a Utah State University graduate student, is designing microscopic "submarines"--drug-bearing capsules that someday could be propelled through the bloodstream by bacteria to attack disease. Looking even further ahead for alternative means of driving these tiny craft, he is considering building biomotors 100 billionths of a meter wide that would use only the bacteria's hairlike, propelling flagella to move ahead...