Policies to Find New Drugs for Bad Bugs
The first is an article from the June 2nd New York Times titled, "Pressure Grows to Create Drugs for 'Superbugs'" by Barry Meier. It highlights the growing urgency for the discovery and development of new antibiotics to treat drug resistant bacteria, a topic we've discussed here before. Potential legislation, FDA rule changes, and new government subsidies for big pharma companies (GlaxoSmithKline is mentioned as an example where this is already in the works) are all floated as ways to streamline and incentivize the discovery, production, and marketing process for new drugs. Here are a few snippets:
"The need for new antibiotics is so urgent, supporters of an overhaul say, that lengthy studies involving hundreds or thousands of patients should be waived in favor of directly testing such drugs in very sick patients"
"The overuse of antibiotics in people and animals, often for conditions for which the drugs are ineffective or not needed, is seen as a driving force in the development of resistant bacteria. As these organisms have evolved and developed resistance, the development of new drugs has not kept pace."
Our Bugs, Ourselves - Current and Future State of the Human Microbiota
The second article is from the March 2013 issue of Nature Reviews Microbiology, which I somehow managed to miss until just a few days ago (my bad). In a Perspectives piece titled, "The microbiome explored: recent insights and future challenges" - FYI this is not open access, so my apologies to those without full-text journal access - the journal interviews 5 prominent figures in the field regarding the current state and future directions of human microbiome/microbiota research. We've touched on this subject several times here at Spent Media! To give you a taste for the content of the discussion, here are some words from each of the featured scientists:
"The most important findings [regarding the human microbiota] to date are: the notion that we as humans are a superorganism, with our biology determined by the genes encoded in our DNA together with the genes of our microbial partners"
"... the current regulatory environment conspires against large-scale trials of prebiotics and probiotics for therapeutic purposes, and a more enlightened regulatory approach is necessary..."
- Dr. Claire Fraser, University of Maryland School of Medicince
"A very surprising finding has been that disruption of the homeostasis between the microbiota and the host, known as dysbiosis, has a more important role than host genetics in the development of a range of diseases, such as inflammatory bowel disease, obesity and type 2 diabetes."
- Dr. Jun Wang, Beijing Genomics Institute
"The human metagenome is orders of magnitude more manipulable than the human genome. This difference provides the opportunities to intercede to prevent and treat illness, if only we knew what was important! The use of faecal transplantation to treat colitis caused by Clostridium difficile seems to have at least some definite efficacy."
- Dr. Martin Blaser, New York University School of Medicine
"For formula-based nutrition supplements, we need to know more than simply the species composition of microbial communities; we need to understand how the communities function as ecosystems."
- Dr. Peer Bork, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany
"... characterizing the microbiota of divergent populations, including geographically and culturally isolated populations before they adopt elements of the Western lifestyle, may be crucial for understanding the suite of so-called Western diseases..."
"... we really lack the ecological and mechanistic understanding of the parameters that control composition and change in the microbiota to make it do our bidding."
- Dr. Rob Knight, University of Colorado at Boulder
[Notice the emphasis - again and again - on needing to gain a more complete understanding of our microbiota as an interconnected, complicated community functioning within a self-contained ecosystem - you.]
Happy reading!
- @EJDimise
