http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/spea ... esistance/New class of antibiotic found in dirt could prove resistant to resistance
by Rachel Feltman
That's the promise of a study published Wednesday in Nature. But the antibiotic, called Teixobactin, is still a couple years away from human trials, and at least four years away from your medicine cabinet. And unfortunately, it doesn't treat some of the world's nastiest bugs. But it could still make a huge impact on health.
Along with his colleagues and the help of a biotech start-up called NovaBiotic Pharmaceuticals, Northeastern University professor Kim Lewis tapped into a largely unexplored treasure trove of new antimicrobials: The dirt.
Dirt from a grassy field in Maine, to be specific.
Most microbiologists only ever work with around 1 percent of microbes -- the ones that will grow politely in the lab. But the rest refuse to grow on traditional growth media, like petri dishes. But there are potential antibiotics all over the world being created by plants, fungi, and microorganisms. Lewis and his colleagues sandwiched soil between two semi-permeable membranes, effectively tricking soil microbes into growing in a "natural" environment that was actually a lab culture.
Among the 10,000 organisms and 25 antibiotics they grew in this new type of culturing method is Teixobactin. It successfully obliterated MRSA and drug-resistant TB in cell cultures and in mice, and did so without any signs that the bacteria might become resistant to it.
The world needs new antibiotics, and several new classes of them -- distinguished by unique chemistry and new methods of action against the microbes they fight -- are in the research pipeline. But because antibiotics are expensive to develop and don't make much money (after all, over-prescribing simply speeds up the formation of bacterial resistance), true innovation comes rarely. If Teixobactin makes it to the market, it could be the first new class of antibiotic in decades.
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http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archi ... ut/383772/Joint Pain, From the Gut
Scientists don't know what causes rheumatoid arthritis, but many suspect that the microbiome—the bacteria that live in our gastrointesntial tracts—may be to blame.DAVID KOHNJAN 12 2015,
Doctors aren’t entirely sure what triggers rheumatoid arthritis, a disease in which the body turns on itself to attack the joints, but an emerging body of research is focusing on a potential culprit: the bacteria that live in our intestines.
Several recent studies have found intriguing links between gut microbes, rheumatoid arthritis, and other diseases in which the body’s immune system goes awry and attacks its own tissue.
A study published in 2013 by Jose Scher, a rheumatologist at New York University, found that people with rheumatoid arthritis were much more likely to have a bug called Prevotella copri in their intestines than people that did not have the disease. In another study published in October, Scher found that patients with psoriatic arthritis, another kind of autoimmune joint disease, had significantly lower levels of other types of intestinal bacteria.
[quote In fact, these bacteria have a powerful vested interest in controlling how our bodies respond to interlopers. Blaser and others say that it appears that many of the bugs that live inside us have thrived by modulating the immune system to avoid being recognized—and attacked—as invaders; in essence, these organisms train immune cells not to be trigger-happy. A microbiome with the wrong sorts of bugs, or the wrong ratio of bugs—a situation known as dysbiosis—may unbalance this immune system, causing immune cells to assault not only bacteria, but also the body itself.
Microbes are especially influential in the gut, which houses two-thirds of the body’s immune cells. As the pathway for digestion, the gastrointestinal tract must deal with a constant stream of food-related foreign microbes, which must be monitored and, if they are harmful, destroyed. To do this, our intestines have developed an extensive immune system, whose effects reach far beyond the gut. Immune cells in the gut seem to be able to activate inflammatory cells throughout the body, including in joints.]
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Scher puts more faith in modifying the microbiome through diet. He notes that some patients with rheumatoid arthritis have benefitted from cutting out meat, or adopting a Mediterranean diet (high in fish, olive oil, and vegetables, and low in meat and saturated fat), though scientists don’t know exactly why this helps. In a separate study, Finnish researchers found that a vegan diet changed the gut microbiome, and that this change was linked to an improvement in arthritis symptoms.