
A radically simple idea may open the door to a new world of antibiotics - obeone
http://www.statnews.com/2015/12/03/antibiotics-bacteria-research/
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danieltillett
The problem developing new antibiotics is not the science it is economic and
regulatory. Let's say you are crazy enough to pay the enormous cost of bring a
new antibiotic through the regulatory process, your new antibiotic doesn't get
used by doctors. They put the new antibiotic on the shelf to be used in
emergencies when all the other antibiotics haven't worked. Your sales are then
near zero. This is why all the major pharmaceutical companies have shut down
their antibiotic divisions.

What we need to work towards is a large cash payment on approval of each drug
or a guaranteed minimium annual payment. Once we have this we will start to
get the new antibiotics we need.

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brownbat
> This is why all the major pharmaceutical companies have shut down their
> antibiotic divisions.

Also, Radiolab recently noted[0] that antibiotic resistance can often be found
in the wild within just a few years after a drug's discovery.

Antibiotic resistance was found in the wild to penicillin before it was even
widely used by the public.

Others had a few years (or sometimes months): Streptomycin ~5 years Linezolid
~2 years Clindamycin ~1 year Piperacillin ~1 year Meticillin 11 months

Why burn through 10 years of development for 1 year of sales? It doesn't even
take very wide use before resistance gets around...

[0] [http://www.radiolab.org/story/best-
medicine/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/best-medicine/)

~~~
mattlutze
The episode took a turn, however, when they looked at Medieval versions of
antibiotics -- a treatment for eye sties, I think they discussed -- they found
the described treatment was wildly effective.

The researchers they interviewed postulate resistance wanes when a treatment
leaves the population for a while.

The conclusion at the end was that it would be beneficial to have a big bevy
of antibiotics and such, that we could rotate through as immunity came and
went.

In this ^ way, it would seem these pharmas, and the pharma market, needs to
adopt a second perspective on antibiotics. They should look at a new drug not
for revenues over the next 6 quarters, but over the next 6 decades. In that
time frame the drug would hit, be shelved, hit, and repeat.

Perhaps this would be one place that more permissive or advantageous patents
would help, by encouraging growth in the antibiotic industry. That probably
sounds unpopular given the general "no patents!" sentiment, but I there could
be reason in it for at least some period of time.

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hyperion2010
The ability to culture organisms is the single most important roadblock to
understanding. Even if a new culturing technique only enables you to grow
.00001 % of the bacterial species out there that is still a 100 fold increase
in the number that we can now study at scale. DNA sequencing has made it
possible to identify new species by looking at their 16s ribosomal RNA, but if
you are looking for small molecules and proteins you have to be able to
amplify the whole organism, not just its nucleic acids.

Huge deal, expect much more to come from microbiologists using this culturing
technique.

~~~
refurb
Why does being able to culture bacterial species matter? We can currently
culture anything that infects humans.

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csours
We need to culture the things that infect the things that infect us.

~~~
refurb
Bacteria that infect other bacteria? Or do you mean bacteria that produce
antibacterial compounds that could be used as antibiotics?

Didn't most antibiotics come from fungi? All of the -mycins came from fungi.

~~~
SCHiM
No, Bacteriophages (phages), viruses that infect and kill bacteria.

~~~
refurb
Why do we need to culture certain bacteria to get the bacteriophages? Can't we
just isolate those?

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joe_the_user
The article gives the impression that a lot of biology involves ad-hoc,
artisanal techniques that have been somewhat standardized and automated over
the years. And that the standardization and automation involved can actually
stand in the way of changing an approach.

There was an article about the standardization of laboratory mice - it allows
large scale, reproducible results but guarantees you won't things that can't
be learned from the single, genetically uniform mouse type that is used.

~~~
adrianN
Currently our understanding of biochemistry is so poor that we still have a
lot to learn about the very basics. I don't think the diversity of our lab
mice is currently a limiting factor.

~~~
danieltillett
Our understanding of biochemistry is actually quite good, it is our
understanding of biochemistry diversity that is poor (i.e. why are you and I
different). Using inbred mice does not help solve this problem.

~~~
adrianN
I'm no expert, but it seems to me that as long as there is still basic
research being done on the behavior of very simple proteins, we're a long way
from understanding the complex interactions that happen in cells.

~~~
danieltillett
Yes we have a lot to learn about all the interactions between proteins in a
cell, but this typically does not fall under the heading of biochemistry.

Slightly off topic the traditional divisions between different areas of
biological sciences that built up in the 20th C have all broken down with the
rise of molecular biology. Once biochemistry was a different field to say
microbiology, now both are part of the super-field of molecular sciences.

