Posted on 01/08/2015 8:10:35 AM PST by SeekAndFind
The first new antibiotic to be discovered in nearly 30 years has been hailed as a ‘paradigm shift’ in the fight against the growing resistance to drugs.
Teixobactin has been found to treat many common bacterial infections such as tuberculosis, septicaemia and C. diff, and could be available within five years. But more importantly it could pave the way for a new generation of antibiotics because of the way it was discovered.
Scientists have always believed that the soil was teeming with new and potent antibiotics because bacteria have developed novel ways to fight off other microbes.
But 99 per cent of microbes will not grow in laboratory conditions leaving researchers frustrated that they could not get to the life-saving natural drugs.
Now a team from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, have discovered a way of using an electronic chip to grow the microbes in the soil and then isolate their antibiotic chemical compounds. They discovered that one compound, Teixobactin, is highly effective against common bacterial infections Clostridium difficile, Mycobacterium tuberculous and Staphylococcus aureus.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Is this the one that so far has only been tested in mice and NOT in humans?
Five years? Wait now, if they’ve tried it and it works, WHY FIVE YEARS???
Amazing the raw ingredients our Heavenly Father has provided here for us.
RE: Five years? Wait now, if they’ve tried it and it works, WHY FIVE YEARS???
I have a three letter acronym for you — F.D.A
I don’t think it’s even gotten to the FDA bureaucracy stage yet. If I’m not mistaken, this is a follow-on to an earlier thread here today about scientists somewhere discovering something in dirt that seems to work wonders with certain ills in mice. It isn’t even close to human testing. My guess is that it’s research hype intended to garner funding of some kind.
If I’m wrong, I’ll be first to admit, but show me something besides it working in a mouse.
Excellent news!
C. diff is a particularly nasty organism. Most antibiotics are quite ineffective against it.
In fact, an infection is usually caused by an extended course of treatment with high power antibiotics killing off its competition and allowing it to thrive. My boss dang near died from it a couple of years ago.
And a lot of palms need to get greased.
The extended testing required by FDA is the reason America was one of the few countries that didn’t have a bunch of thalidomide babies.
But of course that success and others are never weighed against the many that have died because of delays in making drugs available.
Personally, I’ve always thought it made sense to allow voluntary experimentation on people for whom there is otherwise no successful treatment.
“Here’s a not yet thoroughly tested drug that may cure you. On the second hand, it may kill you. On the gripping hand, if you don’t take it you’ll definitely be dead within the week.”
To my mind, that’s pretty much a no-brainer. Decisions on whether to use the drug or not in this way should be left up to patients and their doctors. With careful attention paid to women of childbearing age, for obvious reasons.
This would of course require changes in our liability laws, or drug companies would never allow their products to be used in this way.
A number of years ago my brother in law working for a major pharmaceutical firm was in charge of human trials of a new antibiotic in China. After literally millions of doses a handful of test subjects showed changes in liver function tests. The new antibiotic was pulled because of fears that these small number of side effects would block approval by the FDA in the US market. My brother in law remarked that not even aspirin would be approved by the FDA under these standards.
FDA has authority in GB?
Agreed F.D.A. is the problem as usual.
The discovery was made in Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.
And oh Britain has their own FDA. It’s called Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), and it’s just as bureaucratic.
1) They will have to work out a way to produce this ‘drug’ in significant quantities.
2) They will likely have to test the ‘manufactured’ drug in preclinical (animal and laboratory) testing.
3) Phase I clinical testing will occur (focused on testing the safety of this drug in humans).
4) Phase II and III clinical trials will have to be done to show in humans that the drug is effective, and remains safe.
5) Approval and marketing will then have to occur.
It takes time to plan an perform a clinical trial. Sometimes just one trial can take years to complete - depending on its design and the number of patients required.
So the bottom line is that they’ve announced the “cure” five years early, while it’s still an unknown. Smart. < /sarc >
Eat Dirt!
Precisely. You hit the nail on the head, and this underscores a critical issue in science that is extremely damaging to the US. Scientists aren't supposed to be celebrities, and scientific truth is not something that is supposed to be defined by a PR campaign. We've seen it with global warming, and we've seen it in stem cell therapy, as just two examples. There's way too much hype. Some of it is driven by the media, but a good part of it is driven by what I see as a lapse in scientific ethics such that people are constantly overstating their data in order to get funding, and the fame and notoriety that leads to funding and promotion.
The research that is the focus of this post is a scientifically interesting story, and it was a creative approach this group used to try to do antibiotic discovery ‘in situ’ in the soil. I applaud that, but when a ‘potential’ new antibiotic in a very early stage of its potential development becomes a lay press news story, there is a problem. I don't know for sure, but it would not surprise me if the group involved has a start-up company, predicated on their ‘proprietary’ method of ‘drug discovery’ in situ in the soil. In such cases these kinds of press releases are used to help get venture capital etc. for a start up.
Regarding the stem cell issue, as an example, FR has had multiple postings over the past few years about using stem cells to repair the heart, for example. Whereas this might eventually become reality, at the time this stuff was all over the lay press it was very early and there was tons of hype. I'm in no way denigrating the promise of the field, but keep in mind that one of the most famous groups working in this area has now had to retract several papers, and a lab involved with this group is under investigation by a major university. Truth.
Our Creator, the Heavenly Father, knows our needs and will supply our needs. At the exact right time He will reveal the next "break-through" technology to supply our needs. He has been doing this since the dawn of time.
Men arrogantly believe they are scientifically discovering something, when in reality, God is giving us the next thing we need.
It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings.
...for your Father knows exactly what you need even before you ask him!
They need to prove that it works and that's it's safe to the FDA. They can't just claim it works and get approval.
Because if they release it now and discover in 20 years that it causes cancer, The lawfirm of Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe will sue the maker for $500 billion dollars in a class action lawsuit.
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