ANTIBACTERIAL NOT SO MUCH ANTISEPSIS IN MY OPINION. Notice how Scannon talks of antibacterial even when referring to Meningo. trial. He ain't talking sepsis now is he? WHERE IS THE BIG MONEY TO BE MADE??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????>>>>>>>Alexander Fleming found the property in a common bread mold.
In more recent years, pharmaceutical companies would send
employees out to exotic climes to bring back soil samples. The dirt
then would be screened for potentially helpful organisms.
In the 1980s, researchers began trying to build their own
antibiotics by combining molecules. But those efforts were hampered
by a limited understanding of the microbes' genetic profiles. That
changed in the mid-1990s, when DNA sequencing took off. The
complete gene set of some bacterial strains now is known.
"Now, designing antibiotics because we know the genomic
sequence of bacteria becomes possible," said Dr. Patrick Scannon,
* chief scientific and medical officer at Xoma Corp in Berkeley.
Based on that knowledge, researchers combine chemicals to find
compounds that will hit the right "targets" in a bacterial cell, a
process known as combinatorial chemistry. "With the search-the-dirt
method, you might come up with 1,000 molecules to test," Scannon
said. "Now combinatorial chemistry gives us a million molecules."
New rapid methods of screening those molecules to see if they
have any effect on a cell's DNA means that many more potential drug
compounds are available to researchers.
"The good news is that our chances of finding something that
will actually work is markedly improved," Scannon said.
* Even so, a potential new drug from Xoma with antibiotic
capability was discovered the old-fashioned way: Scientists at New
York University knew that white blood cells can kill bacteria, so
they set about finding how they do it.
* Eventually they isolated a human protein. Xoma then cloned it
and made it into a formulation called Neuprex. Human trials of the
drug on children afflicted with an often deadly blood infection
called meningococcemia have proved promising. The drug also shows
an ability to boost the strength of existing antibiotics.<<<<<<<<<<<<
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