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Abstract Here, we propose a new strategy for the treatment of early cancerous lesions and advanced metastatic disease, via the selective targeting of cancer stem cells (CSCs), a.k.a., tumor-initiating cells (TICs). We searched for a global phenotypic characteristic that was highly conserved among cancer stem cells, across multiple tumor types, to provide a mutation-independent approach to cancer therapy. This would allow us to target cancer stem cells, effectively treating cancer as a single disease of “stemness”, independently of the tumor tissue type. Using this approach, we identified a conserved phenotypic weak point – a strict dependence on mitochondrial biogenesis for...

Kate Kelland, Reuters December 10, 2014LONDON, Dec 11 (Reuters) - Drug-resistant superbugs could kill an extra 10 million people a year and cost up to $100 trillion by 2050 if their rampant global spread is not halted, according to a British government-commissioned review. Such infections already kill hundreds of thousands of people a year and the trend is growing, the review said, adding: "The importance of effective antimicrobial drugs cannot be overplayed." Former Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O'Neill, who led the work, noted that in Europe and the United States alone around 50,000 people currently die each year from...

A deadly epidemic that could have global implications is quietly sweeping India, and among its many victims are tens of thousands of newborns dying because once-miraculous cures no longer work. These infants are born with bacterial infections that are resistant to most known antibiotics, and more than 58,000 died last year as a result, a recent study found. While that is still a fraction of the nearly 800,000 newborns who die annually in India, Indian pediatricians say that the rising toll of resistant infections could soon swamp efforts to improve India's abysmal infant death rate. Nearly a third of the...

Giovanni was one of the 6 million children in the United States who suffer from food allergies, an alarming number that has nearly tripled in the past two decades. Dr. Martin Blaser, a microbiologist and professor at New York University, is working tirelessly on groundbreaking research into this dramatic spike in food allergies. His hypothesis is that exposure to antibiotics early in life is diminishing positive gut bacteria and thus weakening children's immune systems, making them more susceptible to allergies. Blaser warns parents: "Antibiotics are not free, they do have a cost. And it is not just monetary but in...

Scientists at the University of East Anglia have made a breakthrough in the race to solve antibiotic resistance. New research published today in the journal Nature reveals an Achilles’ heel in the defensive barrier which surrounds drug-resistant bacterial cells. The findings pave the way for a new wave of drugs that kill superbugs by bringing down their defensive walls rather than attacking the bacteria itself. It means that in future, bacteria may not develop drug-resistance at all. The discovery doesn’t come a moment too soon. The World Health Organization has warned that antibiotic-resistance in bacteria is spreading globally, causing severe...

... The good news, according to Goldberg, is that this isn’t a hard threat to combat, but he said there are unnecessary hurdles blocking an effective response and putting lives in danger. “We need to take the chains off companies that would otherwise develop antibiotics but aren’t because it’s too expensive or too complicated to do so,” said Goldberg, who then elaborated on the federally imposed hurdles facing drug makers. ... So what needs to happen to relax federal restraints on drug makers? ...

Officials from the World Health Organization warned this week that the workhorse medications we rely on to keep viruses, bacteria and other pathogens in check are in real danger of becoming obsolete. In every region of the globe, health officials have witnessed “very high rates of resistance” to antimicrobial drugs designed to fight bugs like Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus and Klebsiella pneumoniae, according to a new report. These bugs cause pneumonia and infections in the bloodstream, open wounds and the urinary tract.

You never get something for nothing, especially not in health care. Every test, every incision, every little pill brings benefits and risks. Nowhere is that balance tilting more ominously in the wrong direction than in the once halcyon realm of infectious diseases, that big success story of the 20th century. We have had antibiotics since the mid-1940s — just about as long as we have had the atomic bomb, as Dr. Martin J. Blaser points out — and our big mistake was failing long ago to appreciate the parallels between the two. Antibiotics have cowed many of our old bacterial...

LESS THAN A CENTURY AGO, the age-old evolutionary relationship between humans and microbes was transformed not by a gene, but by an idea. The antibiotic revolution inaugurated the era of modern medicine, trivializing once-deadly infections and paving the way for medical breakthroughs: organ transplants and chemotherapy would be impossible without the ability to eliminate harmful bacteria seemingly at will. But perhaps every revolution contains the seeds for its own undoing, and antibiotics are no exception: antibiotic resistance—the rise of bacteria impervious to the new “cure”—has followed hard on the heels of each miracle drug. Recently, signs have arisen that the...

Washington (AFP) - Cow manure, commonly used to fertilize vegetable crops, contains a high number of genes that can fuel resistance to antibiotics, a US study out Tuesday found. These genes come from the cows' gut bacteria, and while none have yet been found in superbugs that are infecting humans, researchers said the potential is real. The research was done by scientists at Yale University, who sampled manure from a handful of dairy cows at a farm in Connecticut. In those samples, they found 80 unique antibiotic resistance genes. About three quarters were unfamiliar. Genetic sequencing showed they were only...

Farmers intentionally feed chicken and other livestock antibiotics to increase their size. But antibiotics may be doing the same thing to you posits Dr. Oz in a new episode of The Dr. Oz Show that takes a look at why antibiotics may be making you fat and could be the cause of your obesity. “Today I’ve got breaking news. Experts are uncovering the hidden reason behind America’s obesity problem: Could you be gaining weight because of antibiotics that you take every day for problems like sore throats and earaches? Or from antibiotics found in our food? It’s an alarming finding,...

WASHINGTON — The Food and Drug Administration says 25 pharmaceutical companies are voluntarily phasing out the use of antibiotics for growth promotion in animals processed for meat. Citing a potential threat to public health, the agency in December asked 26 companies to voluntarily stop labeling drugs important for treating human infection as acceptable for use in animal production. The FDA did not name the one company that has not agreed to withdraw or revise its drugs...

I had a bacterial pneumonia over this last week. It manifested as flu-like symptoms, at first: Low-grade fever, dizziness, chills, then sweats, and a constant fatigue. I thought nothing of it for the first day, having been the self-administered victim of minor food-poisoning before. However, this illness didn't seem to want to pass. By the second day, Sunday, I became more anxious as to the true cause of the malady. It was less likely to be a true influenza, because I had received a flu vaccine shot this year. So what was it? I almost thought to get to the...

The Golden Age of Antibiotics is Over!! Exclusive: Limited Time Coast to Coast Listeners... Sign Up Below to Get One of My Best Selling eBooks for FREE! Secure & Confidential WE GURANTEE YOUR PRIVACY. We hate spam as much as you do. For 60 years we have lived protected by these CURE ALL drugs. Lives have been saved… Billions of lives. True, there have been complications, but that's because of abuse, not because of the wonderful life-saving properties of antibiotics. But NOW it's over: Antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria are spreading like wildfire. There are dozens of deadly antibiotic resistant...

After 85 years, antibiotics are growing impotent. So what will medicine, agriculture and everyday life look like if we lose these drugs entirely? A few years ago, I started looking online to fill in chapters of my family history that no one had ever spoken of. I registered on Ancestry.com, plugged in the little I knew, and soon was found by a cousin whom I had not known existed, the granddaughter of my grandfather’s older sister. We started exchanging documents. After a few months, she sent me something disturbing. It was a black-and-white scan of an article clipped from the...

For over a century cranberries have been more than a Thanksgiving staple; they've also been heralded for their reported ability to prevent and even treat urinary tract infections.But clinical research attempting to link cranberry consumption to a reduction in urinary tract infections remains somewhat inconsistent. A 2012 study by a team from Taiwan and the U.S., published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, found that consuming cranberries did seem to prevent urinary tract infections in certain populations, but qualified the findings with a strong word of caution against using the "folk remedy" as a treatment. Most research on the cranberry's...

Antibiotic resistance, like climate change, is one of those issues that has been blinking red on the world’s dashboard for decades. Everyone agrees it’s potentially disastrous—in fact, has already reached crisis stage in some areas—but interest group politics and crippling political dysfunction combine to make sure nothing is done about it. The issue got another boomlet of attention over the weekend when the CDC launched a new campaign to limit overuse of antibiotics, and Maryn McKenna published an excellent longform piece about it on Medium. The problem: evolution. A new antibiotic works like magic for awhile. But as it is...

About one third of the wounded Syrians who received treatment in recent months in hospitals in northern Israel carry an abnormally high number of bacteria, some of which are either uncommon or unknown in Israel. Some of these bacteria are resistant to all effective antibiotic treatments, reports Israel Hayom, based on statements by senior medical sources in the Health Ministry Directorate and internal documents. The Syrians are being treated for injuries suffered in the civil war that has been raging in their country for the past three years. …

The ever-increasing threat from "superbugs" — strains of pathogenic bacteria that are impervious to the antibiotics that subdued their predecessor generations — has forced the medical community to look for bactericidal weapons outside the realm of traditional drugs. One promising candidate is the antimicrobial peptide (AMP), one of Mother Nature's lesser-known defenses against infections, that kills a pathogen by creating, then expanding, nanometer-sized pores in the cell membrane until it bursts. However, before this phenomenon can be exploited as a medical therapy, researchers need a better understanding of how AMPs and membranes interact at the molecular level. Using a novel...

A high-ranking official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has declared in an interview with PBS that the age of antibiotics has come to an end. 'For a long time, there have been newspaper stories and covers of magazines that talked about "The end of antibiotics, question mark?"' said Dr Arjun Srinivasan. 'Well, now I would say you can change the title to "The end of antibiotics, period.”' The associate director of the CDC sat down with Frontline over the summer for a lengthy interview about the growing problem of antibacterial resistance. Srinivasan, who is also featured in...