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Things like this make me increasingly sad for our priorities as a society. I realize that not everyone can be a biochemist and do antibiotics research, but we'

by timr 13y ago

Things like this make me increasingly sad for our priorities as a society. I realize that not everyone can be a biochemist and do antibiotics research, but we've reached a place where our most technologically savvy people are frittering their talents on food delivery services and cat videos. I have an advanced degree in biochemistry, and it's still basically impossible to get work doing antibiotics development. There's no money in it. I work on websites, because that's where I need to be to earn a living. If I could get venture capital to do speculative work developing new classes of antibiotics, I'd do that in a heartbeat. What's the point? I don't really know. Rome is burning, I guess. Bring on the bread and the circuses. (Postscript: $200M is considered a big initiative in this space. We spend BILLIONS on niche diseases: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323975004578499324161473326.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732397500457849...)

joe_the_user 13y ago
I believe it shows the general insanity of the whole health and food-production systems. As I understand the situation, antibiotic resistance isn't a generally useful adaptation - bacteria tend to lose it "in the wild". So prevalence of antibiotic resistant bacteria, in non human-to-human born diseases like Staph infections, is a somewhat direct result of maintaining a long term, antibiotic filled environment.
- timr 13y ago
  Yes and no. We do overuse (and mis-use) antibiotics, but as long as we use them at all, bacteria will have an evolutionary pressure to adapt to their presence. So while we can mitigate antibiotic resistance by reducing use, we'll only slow down the problem. Antibiotics have changed the way we live, but the price of that change is that we have to invest in the arms race. We invest in all the other arms races, so why not this one?
  - joe_the_user 13y ago
    "We do overuse (and mis-use) antibiotics, but as long as we use them at all, bacteria will have an evolutionary pressure to adapt to their presence." Not necessarily a decisive pressure however. For bacteria which primarily "prey" on human beings this would be true. For bacteria which are primarily endemic to the environment, the loss of fitness involved in antibiotic vulnerability is something of a drop in the bucket. Remember this resistance has a cost in physiological adaptation too. These bacteria, like Staph, that might be "happy" to subside to resisting the common chemicals in a barnyard - unless we human produce an environment where tolerating antibiotic gives the organism a natural bridge to spread through - gigantic hospitals with filled with humans pumped with antibiotics or huge feed lots filled with similarly pumped animals "come to mind".
csomar 13y ago
Interesting. I had a bacterial infection (chronic) lately and was thinking of doing biochemistry as there was no cure in the market for my infection. Surprisingly, honey did a lot more than any class of antibiotics that I tried. Can I reach you by email?
- manmal 13y ago
  I also thought of natural antibiotics like honey or garlic as substitutions, but I also thought that they would only help with gut infections (e.g. no use for infected hip joint after transplant) - is that not so?
  - csomar 13y ago
    I'm using it with my eyes and it's helping my blepharitis more than steroid and antibiotics did. I don't have deep biochemistry knowledge, but I guess they already tried to find out the antibiotics properties of honey/garlic and it didn't help much in real scenarios.
    - w1ntermute 13y ago
      > I guess they already tried to find out the antibiotics properties of honey/garlic and it didn't help much in real scenarios. Speaking more generally, there is limited interest from big pharma in the use of natural or herbal products because they will have to spend a ton of money on clinical trials to prove effectiveness, but they won't get the patent protection necessary to recoup the cost of R&D, like they would with synthetic drugs.
      - robotresearcher 13y ago
        They just change one atom in the big ole organic molecule that doesn't change the effectiveness, and boom: new and patentable drug.
        textminer 13y ago
david_b 13y ago
Yeah, there is something that is regularly overlooked about developing antibiotics: new ones end up on a shelf as the new last resort. If you've got a timeframe (imposed by patent lifetimes) in which you have to recoup your investment, that is a shitty situation for a pharma company to put itself in. "It's for the public good" is not the kind of due dilligence many shareholders like...
- noloqy 13y ago
  You can consider this problem in two ways. Either you see the need for increasing the patent lifetime - at least for certain drugs - or you consider this a weakness of a privatized pharmaceutical industry, and take it as an argument in favor of placing the government in charge of pharmaceutical developments.
cageface 13y ago
Just follow the money. There are plenty of research dollars for cures for diseases that afflict rich people. Just claim that you're targeting cancer in some way and cash the checks. (At least that's the way it was when I was still in the field.)
harshreality 13y ago
When very bad outbreaks start to occur because antibiotics' effectiveness starts dropping precipitously, I think there will be progress. It will take a few years to get ramped up, but given modern technology I think there will be some interesting partial solutions fairly soon after that. The Russians were particularly interested in this sort of thing during the latter part of the Cold War, as I'm sure the West was, and still is. They were looking at enhancing the immune system as an alternative to antibiotics or vaccines for agents that could not necessarily be fought with antibiotics or vaccines (i.e. biological terrorism). They also looked at using immune response as a bioterror target (e.g. something like the reaction to TGN1412 but using a transmissible bioagent instead of a non-biological agent.) They were keenly aware that the two problems were linked. Obviously, immune response is bad at all times when there's no active threatening infection to fight, but needs to be maximized at least along certain paths when there's a threatening infection. That was a difficult problem with 1980's technology. I'm optimistic that it's not quite so intractable a problem, at least in cases of common bacterial infections typically treated with antibiotics today. More narrowly targeted immune system boosting seems plausible now that there's a somewhat better understanding of immune system interactions...
- DanBC 13y ago
  > When very bad outbreaks start to occur because antibiotics' effectiveness starts dropping precipitously, I think there will be progress. Hospital acquired infection is a significant cause of death. > In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated roughly 1.7 million hospital-associated infections, from all types of microorganisms, including bacteria, combined, cause or contribute to 99,000 deaths each year. > In Europe, where hospital surveys have been conducted, the category of Gram-negative infections are estimated to account for two-thirds of the 25,000 deaths each year. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital-acquired_infection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital-acquired_infection) These are just nosocomial (hospital acquired) and not necessarily antibiotic resistant.
  - harshreality 13y ago
    Resistant infections in hospitals must not yet be a significant enough problem to get lots of smart people working on the problem. Or, rather, they're working on trying to contain infections and reduce transmissions rather than on how to treat the infections, right? The other shoe has to drop before other half of the problem gets serious attention.
delinquentme 13y ago
Allow me to assure you that saying " I just program websites " is selling yourself short. At the VERY least I urge you to design novel experiments and post them publicly.

by timr 13y ago

joe_the_user 13y ago

I believe it shows the general insanity of the whole health and food-production systems. As I understand the situation, antibiotic resistance isn't a generally useful adaptation - bacteria tend to lose it "in the wild". So prevalence of antibiotic resistant bacteria, in non human-to-human born diseases like Staph infections, is a somewhat direct result of maintaining a long term, antibiotic filled environment.

timr 13y ago
Yes and no. We do overuse (and mis-use) antibiotics, but as long as we use them at all, bacteria will have an evolutionary pressure to adapt to their presence. So while we can mitigate antibiotic resistance by reducing use, we'll only slow down the problem. Antibiotics have changed the way we live, but the price of that change is that we have to invest in the arms race. We invest in all the other arms races, so why not this one?
- joe_the_user 13y ago
  "We do overuse (and mis-use) antibiotics, but as long as we use them at all, bacteria will have an evolutionary pressure to adapt to their presence." Not necessarily a decisive pressure however. For bacteria which primarily "prey" on human beings this would be true. For bacteria which are primarily endemic to the environment, the loss of fitness involved in antibiotic vulnerability is something of a drop in the bucket. Remember this resistance has a cost in physiological adaptation too. These bacteria, like Staph, that might be "happy" to subside to resisting the common chemicals in a barnyard - unless we human produce an environment where tolerating antibiotic gives the organism a natural bridge to spread through - gigantic hospitals with filled with humans pumped with antibiotics or huge feed lots filled with similarly pumped animals "come to mind".

csomar 13y ago

Interesting. I had a bacterial infection (chronic) lately and was thinking of doing biochemistry as there was no cure in the market for my infection. Surprisingly, honey did a lot more than any class of antibiotics that I tried. Can I reach you by email?

manmal 13y ago
I also thought of natural antibiotics like honey or garlic as substitutions, but I also thought that they would only help with gut infections (e.g. no use for infected hip joint after transplant) - is that not so?
- csomar 13y ago
  I'm using it with my eyes and it's helping my blepharitis more than steroid and antibiotics did. I don't have deep biochemistry knowledge, but I guess they already tried to find out the antibiotics properties of honey/garlic and it didn't help much in real scenarios.
  - w1ntermute 13y ago
    > I guess they already tried to find out the antibiotics properties of honey/garlic and it didn't help much in real scenarios. Speaking more generally, there is limited interest from big pharma in the use of natural or herbal products because they will have to spend a ton of money on clinical trials to prove effectiveness, but they won't get the patent protection necessary to recoup the cost of R&D, like they would with synthetic drugs.
    - robotresearcher 13y ago
      They just change one atom in the big ole organic molecule that doesn't change the effectiveness, and boom: new and patentable drug.
      - textminer 13y ago

david_b 13y ago

Yeah, there is something that is regularly overlooked about developing antibiotics: new ones end up on a shelf as the new last resort. If you've got a timeframe (imposed by patent lifetimes) in which you have to recoup your investment, that is a shitty situation for a pharma company to put itself in. "It's for the public good" is not the kind of due dilligence many shareholders like...

noloqy 13y ago
You can consider this problem in two ways. Either you see the need for increasing the patent lifetime - at least for certain drugs - or you consider this a weakness of a privatized pharmaceutical industry, and take it as an argument in favor of placing the government in charge of pharmaceutical developments.

cageface 13y ago

Just follow the money. There are plenty of research dollars for cures for diseases that afflict rich people. Just claim that you're targeting cancer in some way and cash the checks. (At least that's the way it was when I was still in the field.)

harshreality 13y ago

When very bad outbreaks start to occur because antibiotics' effectiveness starts dropping precipitously, I think there will be progress. It will take a few years to get ramped up, but given modern technology I think there will be some interesting partial solutions fairly soon after that. The Russians were particularly interested in this sort of thing during the latter part of the Cold War, as I'm sure the West was, and still is. They were looking at enhancing the immune system as an alternative to antibiotics or vaccines for agents that could not necessarily be fought with antibiotics or vaccines (i.e. biological terrorism). They also looked at using immune response as a bioterror target (e.g. something like the reaction to TGN1412 but using a transmissible bioagent instead of a non-biological agent.) They were keenly aware that the two problems were linked. Obviously, immune response is bad at all times when there's no active threatening infection to fight, but needs to be maximized at least along certain paths when there's a threatening infection. That was a difficult problem with 1980's technology. I'm optimistic that it's not quite so intractable a problem, at least in cases of common bacterial infections typically treated with antibiotics today. More narrowly targeted immune system boosting seems plausible now that there's a somewhat better understanding of immune system interactions...

DanBC 13y ago
> When very bad outbreaks start to occur because antibiotics' effectiveness starts dropping precipitously, I think there will be progress. Hospital acquired infection is a significant cause of death. > In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated roughly 1.7 million hospital-associated infections, from all types of microorganisms, including bacteria, combined, cause or contribute to 99,000 deaths each year. > In Europe, where hospital surveys have been conducted, the category of Gram-negative infections are estimated to account for two-thirds of the 25,000 deaths each year. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital-acquired_infection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital-acquired_infection) These are just nosocomial (hospital acquired) and not necessarily antibiotic resistant.
- harshreality 13y ago
  Resistant infections in hospitals must not yet be a significant enough problem to get lots of smart people working on the problem. Or, rather, they're working on trying to contain infections and reduce transmissions rather than on how to treat the infections, right? The other shoe has to drop before other half of the problem gets serious attention.

delinquentme 13y ago

Allow me to assure you that saying " I just program websites " is selling yourself short. At the VERY least I urge you to design novel experiments and post them publicly.