International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), the world’s largest computer-services provider, may have a tiny solution for a $34 billion public health problem.
Engineers based in IBM’s San Jose, California, facility created nanoparticles 50,000 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair that can search out and obliterate the cell walls of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotic drugs. The minute structures harmlessly degrade, leaving no residue, according to a study describing the work in the journal Nature Chemistry.
When antibiotic drugs are used to attack a colony of bacteria, they sometimes leave behind survivors that become resistant to the medicine’s future use. IBM’s nanoparticles were able to find and destroy the cells of resistant germs during testing in laboratory dishes. They also caused no apparent harm in separate tests in mice, the research found.
IBM’s technology “goes outside the scheme of current antibiotics to something that physically destroys bacteria,” said Mario Raviglione, chief of the World Health Organization’s Stop TB department, in a telephone interview. “If this is proven to work in humans, it will simply revolutionize the way we deal with antimicrobial treatment.”
The nanoparticles, were designed to attack methicillin- resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, a widely circulating strain of drug-resistant bacteria. An IBM team led by James Hedrick collaborated with scientists at the Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore.
Continue here: IBM’s Tiny Technology Rips Up Drug-Resistant Germ Cells in Early Studies – Bloomberg.
