MRSA Notes

Researchers are always looking for a new way to fight off these nasty bacteria. There is a very fine line between killing bacteria that are invading your body systems, and killing your body systems themselves. Therein lies the rub.

Hot on the heels of the protein research done at the University of Missouri that discovered proteins that were released from MRSA bacteria that disabled your immune system, comes this article, from Scientific American, which discusses the UK testing of proteins that boost your immune system in order to fight bacteria. To me, these two researchers sound like they are working on the opposite ends of the same process (a good thing if they meet in the middle with dead MRSA!), but you know I am just a normal ol’ gal, and am likely missing something. Anyway, for those of you interested in the gory details of this UK research:

Looking for new ways to attack these so-called superbugs, Hancock studied a group of short proteins, or peptides, that in high concentrations can kill bacteria.Concerned that the peptides might trigger sepsis, a potentially lethal condition brought on by bacteria in the bloodstream, Hancock administered them to infected mice. “What we found, in contrast, was they actually reverse sepsis,” he says. The only trouble was that they also caused allergylike reactions and killed healthy intestinal cells. So he and his colleagues engineered shorter peptides that they hoped would prevent sepsis without causing other complications.

They hit on a 13-amino-acid peptide, which they call an innate defense regulator (IDR-1). To test it out, they injected mice with IDR-1 either one to two days before or four hours after infecting them with VRE, MRSA or Salmonella. The treated mice were nearly twice as likely to survive infection, the group reports this week in Nature Biotechnology.

It really sounds to me like some strides forward are being made here. I like hearing something other than “finding a new antibiotic that will kill MRSA that won’t kill you.”

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