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|| health & wellness | AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION
ria with a particular metabolism.
Second, animal and plant producers of antibiotic substances need to be sought in new places, the natural sources and unique geographical and ecological zones that they inhabit should be utilized more vigorously, and new technologies should be developed for obtaining and cultivating them.
These two ways are already being implemented. As an example of the first way, in a project headed by Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and Chemistry at Yale University and Nobel Prize winner in chemistry Sidney Altman, scientists are searching for artificial analogs of nucleic acids— more exactly, fragments of them— that easily penetrate a cell and enter into interaction with its DNA and RNA. Such fragments can be created for every specific pathogen by analyzing its genome.
As to the second way, Russians will remember the ancient folk practice of putting a frog in a jug of milk so the milk wouldn’ t go sour; researchers at Moscow State University have studied the science behind the folkway, and they have succeeded in extracting antimicrobial peptides from the skin of frogs. Scientists are attempting to apply this research to medical technology.
The areas of antimicrobial research that are currently drawing the most interest are in bacteriophages, or bacterial viruses, and peptides.
Phagotherapy isn’ t medicine as we have traditionally understood it, but rather a service package that includes rapid diagnostics and the selection of the necessary means against a particular pathogen. At the Hirschfeld Memorial Institute in Wroclaw, Poland, bacterial viruses are used as personalized medical treatment, and with great success, even in cases of neglected suppurative infections.
Peptides are the smaller siblings of proteins: they consist of up to fifty amino acids, while proteins may have hundreds and thousands of them. In distinction from antibiotics, which, as a rule, act on a certain molecular target, peptides embed themselves in the cellular membrane of bacteria and form special structures there. The membrane finally collapses under the weight of the peptides, the invaders penetrate inside, and the cell itself is torn apart and dies. Moreover, peptides act rapidly, while the evolution of the membrane’ s structure is a very disadvantageous and difficult process for bacteria. Under such conditions, the likelihood of bacteria developing resistance to peptides is minimal.
In these two areas, scientific studies are in full swing all over the world.
ARTI: I can make a reassuring comment here. In July of 2017 an article was published in the journal Nature about a new-generation antibiotic called teixobactin,“ grown” by a team consisting of biologists from the United States, Germany, and Great Britain assembled by NovoBiotics Pharmaceuticals.
The biologists developed a device that can be lowered into the ground to let bacteria grow in an environment that is natural to them. The substances that these bacteria exuded during their life activities were subsequently tested on mice that had been infected with dangerous illnesses. One of these substances possessed pronounced antibiotic characteristics and proved to be effective against most gram-positive bacteria that were resistant to all other antibiotics. The substance that was found harms ferments so important to bacterial cell wall formation that changing any of them is fatal to the cell wall. Providing that this new antibiotic substance is used with great caution— only in those instances where other means are ineffective— bacteria will not be able to develop resistance to it for at least thirty or forty years.
The pharmaceutical company plans to put its new drug on the market within five years, so our generation will have at least one way to resist the threat of global epidemics caused by mutated bacteria.
ALPEON. COM