The High-Stakes Plan to Eliminate Deadly Superbugs

[FLPanhandle]

http://gizmodo.com/scientists-want-to-use-predators-to-fight-drug-resistan-1776488151



Bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics far more quickly than humans are discovering new ones. That’s why a DARPA-funded research team is exploring a fascinating new way we might win the war against germs: not with drugs, but with predatory bacteria that sound like monsters from science fiction.

Lions, sharks, and Schwarzenegger flicks are more likely to come to mind when you hear the word “predator,” but certain bacteria are also fearsome hunters, voraciously consuming their fellow single-celled organisms. In fact, predatory bacteria have no trouble annihilating some of the most drug-resistant bugs. Microbiologist Daniel Kadouri hopes we can use these killers to our advantage.

“Every agency out there—the WHO, the CDC, the NIH—have all figured out that drug resistant pathogens are as big a threat as global warming,” Kadouri said when I spoke with him at a DARPA technology expo this week. “We’re trying to see if we can do things differently, by using predatory bacteria as live antibiotics.”
colleagues have been conducting laboratory experiments that pit two specific predators—bacteria from the genera Bdellovibrio and Micavibrio—against some of the deadliest human pathogens.

“Bdellovibrio attacks biofilms,” Kadouri said, referring to the sticky bacterial secretions that become the spawning ground of drug-resistant infections. “They’ll attach to the biofilm, drill themselves inside the cells, and start dividing. From one [Bdellovibrio] cell entering you can get about 80 cells breaking out. It’s like something from the movie Alien.”

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Humans can be clever little apes when we put our minds to it.

[1StrongBlackMan]

1. Didn't Will Smith play in the movie?