Hi everyone :)

Over 20000 people die every year from drug resistent bacteria. Researchers from the MIT and other institutions want to fight this issue and state, a antimicrobial peptide packaged in a silicon nanoparticle can help. The silicon packages prevents releasing the peptides too soon and the peptide reduces the number of bacteria in the lungs of mice infected with Pseudomonas aeruginosa. It is a disease causing Gram-negative bacterium ( bacterium with two membrans)  that can lead to pneumonia. 

How does a bacteria get resistent?

It has several reasons. Medicine used antibiotics when it isn't necessary to use it. People with a cold often get antibiotics, even if they aren't infected by bacteria, but with a virus, against which it can't do anything. Also they miss the dose often, so lower antibiotic concentration contributes to the increase of AMR by introducing more mutations that support bacterial growth in higher antibiotic concentration.  Eating meat is also a factor. The meat industry uses antibiotics for their animals, which stay in the meat people eat, so they can get into the organism of consumers.

A bacteria itself has mechanisms to fight the drugs:  They can build proteins that deactivate the antibiotics or change structure spots, where it could have connected to the bacteria. Also the permeability of the cell can be changed, so the medicine can't get into the bacteria or the bacteria develops efflux pumps to get it out of the cell. Another point is that bacteria can divide themself in 20-30 minutes, making mutations able, which cause a resistence. Horizontal gene transfer (shown in the bottom picture), where resitence genes can be transfered even from bacterias, which aren't phynogenetically near, is a problem too.

How can nanoparticles help?

The increasing number of resistent bacteria lead scientists to explore the antimicrobial peptides, wich occurre naturally as a defensive protein that can kill many types of bacteria. The proteins can disrupt cellular targets like proteins and membranes or cellular processes such as the protein synthesis. The researchers choosed KLAKAK, a bacterial toxin, at which they attached trafficking peptides (interacting with membranes of bacteria). In this case the most effective was "lactoferin"(30% better at killing the bacteria, minmal toxic effect on human cells). The package of silicon helps to transport the peptides to the spots where they are need, instead of getting released to early in the body, damaging tissue on the way to the bacteria.

Future

This method could be adapted to target other illnesses, such as tuberculosis. The team also works on using trafficking peptides to help existing antibiotics that kill Gram-positive bacteria to cross the double membrane of Gram-negative bacteria. This would allow them, to kill these better protected bacteria aswell. The research is based on the teams approach of delivering targeted cancer drugs to tumor cells. Nanotechnology is big  filed as you can see. Another way of curing cancer could be nanoparticles, used to make anti-cancer chemotherapy more effective by delivering the drug directly to tumor cells and leaving healthy bodycells intact. The nanocoating of the particles may have to be researched, because the body can't dismantle them. In the future, particles can get better designed, to target specific body regions and the studys can transferred, to help fighting other diseases as well. For example, zeolite l crystals can be used to connect components that enable them to connect to bacteria and kill them, as soon as red light activates them. Researchers are thinking about a cream against cancer for example.

Conclusion

Nanotechnology will have a major impact on how we fight diseases in the future. Possible risks of those technologies should always be considered and reduced to get better methods of curing patients with health problems, normal methods aren't able to fight.

I hope you enjoyed the post

have a nice day :)

Sources

Text

http://news.mit.edu/2017/antibiotic-nanoparticles-fight-drug-resistant-bacteria-0712

https://nano-magazine.com/news/2017/7/14/antibiotic-nanoparticles-fight-drug-resistant-bacteria

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_resistance#Human_medicine

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotikaresistenz

Pictures

http://www.me-med.com/html5/Web/2466/antibiotic_resistance-b.png

http://montessorimuddle.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/plasmid-transfer-490x240.png

http://www.ru.nl/publish/pages/736735/nanomed-infographic-def-rgb-477x404-px.png

https://2nznub4x5d61ra4q12fyu67t-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Nanotechnology-in-Health-Care.jpg