|
OneEightHundred posted:It doesn't necessarily even need to cost energy, it's just that there's never been enough penicillin-producing mold in the world to put a significant amount of selective pressure on it. It's been a long time since I've been in the antibiotics space but the hotness ~15 years ago was that antibiotics are generally means for cross species communication. That's why soil bacteria (organisms that exist in a highly heterogeneous matrix) produce all kinds of antibiotics. If you up the dosage, they become a "killing word" where you start to seriously gently caress poo poo up. That's a nicely selective give-and-take game, where you can have peaceful communication as well as biological warfare, depending on expression levels. We've been using antibiotics outside of their context. If you live in a world of screams, deafness makes sense. Same principle applies, only it's more often a gain of function or overexpression of existing mechanisms. Hearing so well you block out the screams, if you will.
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2017 09:02
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 15:50 |
|
|
blowfish posted:bacteria aren't people dude So?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2017 16:59
|
|
|
It's not that hard to make new antibiotics. There is just no will to do it because there isn't (yet) enough of a financial return. It's expensive to bring a drug to market and antibiotics tend to be sold cheaply. Eventually (and after many avoidable deaths) there will be sufficient profit motivation to bring new classes of antibiotic drugs to market.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2017 17:33
|
|
|
Again, ~15 years ago the field of quorum sensing found a number of potential antibiotics that seemed to have minimal side effects in mammalian systems. There were some synthetic antibiotics that were designed around that time too. None of them made it to clinical trials, so who knows? It's not easy but it's not like the knowledge base isn't there. Bringing a drug to market isn't trivial but in terms of the kinds of medical questions being asked right now, it's on the easier side of things.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2017 17:47
|
|