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+--- Thread: Researchers turn to tiny robots to fight antibiotic resistance (/thread-13637.html)
Researchers turn to tiny robots to fight antibiotic resistance - C C - Feb 11, 2023
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300515120
RELEASE: Antimicrobial resistance remains an urgent problem, yet new drugs are devilishly hard to find, develop, and test. And even successful breakthroughs are only a temporary fix. “Bacteria have developed resistance to all traditional antibiotics,” says microbiologist Ana Santos at Rice University in Houston, TX, and at Fundación Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria Islas Baleares in Palma, Spain. “We need to try something completely different that they don’t already know from history and haven’t been exposed to throughout their evolution.”
Nanomachines could some day offer a novel approach for treating dangerous infections from MRSA, shown here in a digitally colorized, scanning electron microscopic image in which orange-colored cellular debris surround the mustard-colored spherical bacteria. Image credit: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Santos has been collaborating at Rice with chemist James Tour on such a prospect. Rather than searching for new antimicrobial compounds, their group uses what might best be described as a brute-force approach. The researchers have recently been designing tiny, spinning molecular machines, which travel to the site of an infection and drill holes in infectious pathogens, tearing the tough outer membranes apart. Without the outer membrane, the vulnerable innards spill out, and the cell dies. In lab tests, the molecular machines can puncture a wide variety of pathogens, acting as a sort of synthetic antibiotic that can even effectively kill bacterial populations resistant to antibiotics and persisters, a subpopulation of cells thought to promote resistance.
Such collaborative approaches between microbiologists and chemists offer a fundamentally new way to fight disease. Where antibiotics take a biological approach, nanomachines offer a decidedly mechanical one. “It’s really taking a tool from the chemistry realm and applying it to biology,” Santos says. Recent experiments by Santos and Tour—and other groups—have tested nanomachines against cell lines and in animal models of antimicrobial-resistant infections. Early findings have been promising, hinting at a range of biomedical applications. Whether they can be successfully translated into real-world, clinical settings, however, remains to be seen... (MORE - details)