Weeding Out Bacteria

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But McDougald points out that in one million years of evolution, no bacteria have developed a resistance to furanones in the natural environment.

She and her colleagues will soon publish data that details the communication system they've discovered in bacteria. And they continue to study the furanones in mice and tissue culture. Preliminary results show that the compounds work against Pseudomonas aeruginosa, the major cause of death in cystic fibrosis patients.

The first products to come from the research will likely be used simply to coat medical supplies and devices. A biotech company, Biosignal, hopes to commercialize the technology and is developing contact lenses -- human trials should begin in a year -- as well as urinary catheters with the furanone attached to the surface to prevent infection.

"This technology will allow us to coat most any surface that is implanted into the body, artificial joints, heart valves etc.,"says McDougald. "These are a huge source of secondary infections due to bacteria attaching to the surfaces and growing."

Another company, Quorex Pharmaceuticals, hopes to get a chunk of the $25 billion antibacterial market by exploiting furanones to develop infection-fighting drugs. Quorex's website says its technology will speed up the drug discovery process, although it normally takes anywhere from five to 10 years to develop a new drug and get it through the regulatory process.

This is just the beginning, though, of what many researchers believe will be the harnessing of naturally-occurring defense mechanisms to fend of disease and infection. Already, other researchers in Eastern Europe and Russia have been using bacteria-eating viruses called phages in treatments.

Phage never caught on in the West, mainly because antibiotics were effective and phage therapy is extremely specific. One phage will eat only one strain of one type of bacteria, and it seems more likely than furanones to fall victim to antibiotic resistance.

Whatever the solution, new drugs will likely come from studies of how organisms fight bacteria in the environment, says Julia Kubanek, an assistant biology professor at Georgia Tech. McDougald and her colleagues discovered the furanone phenomenon when they noticed that a certain red sea algae in the bay escaped the creep of bacteria and barnacles.

"If the UNSW group had not been interested in how seaweeds ward off bacterial colonization, this discovery would not have occurred," says Kubanek. "The insights that come from studying ecological processes are valuable to protection of human health and the environment."