Winning war against ‘superbugs’
A team of scientists just won a battle in the war against antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” — and only time will tell whether their feat is akin to a bacterial Battle of Gettysburg that turns the tide toward victory. They won this particular battle, or at least gained some critical intelligence, not by designing a new antibiotic, but by interfering with the metabolism of the bacterial “bugs” — E. coli in this case — and rendering them weaker in the face of existing antibiotics, as reported today in Nature Biotechnology. It’s the “kick ’em when they’re down” style of fighting, and the team from Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Boston University used sophisticated computer modeling and biotechnology as their weapons of choice. “We are in critical need for novel strategies to boost our antibiotic arsenal,” said senior author and Wyss core faculty member Jim Collins, a pioneer of synthetic biology who is...