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Fabimycin and Its Activity against Drug-Resistant Gram-Negative Pathogens (acs.org)
69 points by dsego on Aug 16, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 12 comments



Interesting. Could this potentially kill the gram negative bacteria such as P. Gingivalis that causes destructive gum disease? Seems barbaric (and expensive!) that my dentist says the only treatment is to get my gums aggressively scraped every few months.


It could! We need to invest in developing better treatments for oral pathogens like P. gingivalis. Gum disease is way too pervasive (over half of US adults have it), and yet we still treat it mechanically with manual cleanings. Moving towards using targeted therapies and rebalancing the oral microbiome is a much more effective (and ultimately affordable!) path forward. My company is focused on helping people improve their oral microbiome health, so developments like this are super exciting.


Oh yeah I keep seeing you around on dental threads and considered getting the test but I’m not really sure what action would be taken after knowing what’s in my mouth? Like I’m pretty sure I just have destructive gum disease and need a scraping every three months forever, what comes after getting the test? What do I do with that knowledge?


Great question! There are a number of steps you can take beyond cleanings, some of which will depend on your current oral microbiome (which we'll provide coaching on once you get your results). We recommend a comprehensive approach, which includes certain products, diet, and lifestyle interventions to help reduce the levels of pathogenic bacteria and promote beneficial species (which are a natural defense against the pathogens!). Here are some resources on diet [1] + probiotics [2] to help get started in the meantime, though:

[1] Diet: https://www.bristlehealth.com/post/improve-your-oral-microbi...

[2] Probiotics: https://www.bristlehealth.com/post/a-guide-to-oral-probiotic...


Your company’s information is interesting, but the large majority of non ADA/AMA health-forward businesses give me doubt. One of the reasons for this doubt that shows up in your [2] post is the lack of citations for the claims.

It isn’t that I distrust the writing (it seems convincing to me, the author does have a research degree and provides more credibility in my opinion), but what would push the belief home is citations for the studies/experiments which show the testable claims your company makes are not incorrect.

While I can spend time looking up the information, life is too short and I’m likely to not do so and instead ignore it until a regulatory body checks it all out.


Thanks for taking the time to point this out! We will add more citations in the beginning sections, as I realized some of our links didn't come through. Most citations begin after the "S. salivarius and bad breath (halitosis)" section, but our blog formatting just shows them as bolded text links. We will make this more clear as well. Thanks again!


Are there any beneficial oral gram negative bacteria though?


TL;DR: new antibiotic candidate effective against gram-negative bacterias, which are generally resistant against most antibiotics because of their thick cell walls and efflux pumps, which in combination prevents absorption of antibiotics in their cell. Favimycin shows promising results against common resistant strains of bacterias, including E.coli, further unlike other broad-spectrum antibiotics, this one doesn't affect the gut microbiome much. Current challanges include overcoming low stability in blood plasma and toxicity.


> TL;DR: new antibiotic candidate effective against gram-negative bacterias, which are generally resistant against most antibiotics because of their thick cell walls and efflux pumps

Aren't mycins something very well known and not novel at all?

I see them listed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_antibiotics along with a link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aminoglycoside that explain they work against gram-negative bacterias


“Mycin” is a suffix used in antibiotics, but does not represent a specific category anymore. If you look at the structure of fabimycin you will see that it does not resemble an aminoglycoside at all.


There are many bacteria that are developing resistance (or are totally resistant) to some mycins (macrolides, particularly azithromycin). Gonorrhea being a HUGE one.


A MIC of 2 micrograms/mL is not great (penicillin is an order of magnitude lower), but I guess one has to walk before one runs.




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