When bacteria face antibiotics, some fraction of them survive by going dormant. These persisters can go on to produce recurrent infections.
Now it looks like certain aminoglycoside antibiotics can eradicate bacterial persisters with the help of “specific metabolites” — or sugars:
The researchers combined gentamicin with different kinds of sugars, including mannitol, fructose and glucose.
When the scientists added these sweetened antibiotics to bacteria grown in Petri dishes, it killed over 99% of the bacterial persisters. The type of sugar seemed to make a difference, as well; only fructose helped the drug kill S. aureus, for instance.
The goal, said senior author James Collins, was essentially to “get them up off the ground so we can punch them and knock them out,” and it seems to have worked. The sugar got the bacterial persisters to wake up out of their dormant state just enough that they took in the antibiotics, which killed them.
Senior author James Collins had his own reasons for pursuing this topic:
James Collins was a junior at the College of the Holy Cross, running 80 to 90 miles a week as he worked to shave seconds off his 4:17 mile, when he was sidelined with strep throat. He went to the infirmary, took a two-week course of antibiotics, and felt better.
Then it happened again — 13 times over the next two years, ending his college track career.
Some 25 years later, Collins is a Boston University bioengineer whose research on the warfare between bacteria and antibiotics has persuaded him that his illnesses in college were more than bad luck. Instead, he blames “persisters,’’ bacteria that evade medications by slipping into a zombielike state, then mysteriously reawaken to cause new infections.
[...]
Collins’s laboratory is now testing whether a similar sugar and antibiotic cocktail might work against the bacteria that cause tuberculosis.And it is not purely a matter of scientific interest. Two years ago, in the midst of this research, Collins’s mother was hospitalized with a staph infection. She was put on intravenous antibiotics and got better — only to see the same infection return again and again.
“It was frustrating for me to see this occur,” Collins said. “But satisfying to think that we may now have a treatment that… is very simple, very inexpensive, and is something that could be implemented quite readily.”
Collins sounds like a versatile scientist:
Collins is a MacArthur “genius’’ grant recipient who is best known for building a vibrating shoe insole that could help elderly people, who often have trouble with balance, stay steady. But nine years ago his laboratory began studying the precise interactions between bacteria and antibiotics, in search of new ammunition for the escalating war against infections.
A while ago, when I was researching Nobel Prizes and the like, I checked out the recipients of the MacArthur “genius” awards, and while some smart and creative people deservedly get them — evolutionary theorist Margie Prophet, for example, who seems to have become psychotic, disappeared and probably died in the past few years — it is obvious from the demography that the awards are mostly given not for genius potential but instead for symbolic and politically correct reasons: the representation of PC-favoured groups and behaviours is way too high. Which is probably why hardly anybody has heard of MacArthur awards, and why they are so stunningly unsuccessful in achieving their aims.
Calling something a “genius” award is just asking for trouble, really.