Some more info:

I thought about writing my dissertation on MRSA, but am looking for a new topic. Here is what I had on file:

Rockpools could contain MRSA cure


http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/health/2803451.stm


Firm makes 'healing super-water'


http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/6684701.stm


French Clay Can Kill MRSA And 'Flesh-Eating' Bacteria



http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071025120514.htm



Garlic 'beats hospital superbug'


http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/3344325.stm


Maggots rid patients of MRSA


http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/maggots-rid-patients-mrsa-13143.html


Q & A on MRSA:


http://www.earthclinic.com/CURES/MRSA.html


Flesh-eating bugs become cancer killers

· 09:42 27 November 2001
· Philip Cohen, San Francisco

Injecting flesh-eating bugs into people with cancer may sound crazy - but initial studies suggest the only danger is that they destroy tumours so fast that the body might not be able to cope with the remains.

The trick is to pick anaerobic bacteria that thrive in the oxygen-poor interior of fast-growing tumours, but die as they reach oxygen-rich healthy tissue.
"The exciting thing is we can combine this approach with chemotherapy and hit the tumour from both the inside and the outside," says Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.

Tumours supply themselves with food and oxygen by growing blood vessels. But some tumours grow so rapidly their interiors become starved of blood and oxygen, and turn into "necrotic" regions full of dead and dying cells.

Surprisingly, this makes them more difficult to destroy. Drugs cannot reach the tissue at lethal doses because its blood supply is so poor, while radiation treatments depend on oxygen to trigger cell death. After treatment stops, surviving cells from the necrotic region can start dividing again.

All consuming

Cancer researchers have long realised that anaerobic bacteria could be used to attack the necrotic region without harming healthy tissue. But the microbes tested so far have left parts of tumours untouched. So Vogelstein's team widened the search, testing 26 strains of anaerobic bacteria.

When they injected the soil bacterium Clostridium[ck] novyi into the bloodstream of mice with tumours, it spread throughout the necrotic region, consuming living tumour cells as well as dead tissue.

"That was completely unexpected," says Vogelstein. "We thought we'd have to genetically engineer it to do that." However, the microbes perished near the edges of the tumour, leaving the job half done.

So the researchers tried combining the bugs with chemotherapy. "The tumour died so quickly, you could almost watch it," says Vogelstein. Out of eight animals given the combination treatment, the tumours shrank dramatically or disappeared completely in seven, and regrew only in one, the team reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Combining these different approaches is a very clever move," says Rakesh Jain, a cancer researcher at Harvard Medical School in Boston. "It's wonderful work."

Global supply

The catch is that three of the eight mice died. But the researchers think this could be because the tumours were destroyed so quickly that the waste products flooded the animals' circulation.

In small animals these toxins spread too quickly to combat, but in humans they should not be lethal. "We'll need to go to larger animals to test that theory out," says Vogelstein.

He says it will probably be years before the therapy is ready for its clinical debut. But when the time comes, it will not be hard to stock up on the prolific microbe. "We can grow a world supply of it in my lab in one day," he says.

Related Articles
· Molecular time bomb targets cancer cells
· http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn1575
· 16 November 2001
· Arsenic's cancer paradox resolved
· http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn1560
· 14 November 2001
· Tiny spinning screws could burrow into tumours
· http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn878
· 13 June 2001
Weblinks
· Anti-cancer drug development, Johns Hopkins
· http://www.med.jhu.edu/pharmacology/pages/acdd_pro.html
· Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
· http://www.pnas.org/

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