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Speckfresser t1_j65r15l wrote

Ok, but does this kill bacteria indiscriminately? I have concerns for my skin flora, gut flora and other populations of organisms that science has not yet identified that support healthy human existence.

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Block_Me_Amadeus t1_j67e84c wrote

Excellent question. I try to avoid antibiotics as much as I can, but got strep a month ago and had to go on clavamox. The happy flora that usually make my reproductive area peaceful are still rebuilding their population.

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Speckfresser t1_j67qxlz wrote

I recently had a serious ear infection.

I was advised that the medication given for a 2-ish week period would devastate my gut flora after week 1, and was given advice of what to eat to minimise the impact.

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Block_Me_Amadeus t1_j69r7uf wrote

I take a great probiotic and eat yogurt, but that still isn't enough of a help. My poor hoo-ha situation is so upset!

I hope your ear is better. We are so lucky to have treatments that can save our lives and our hearing. Most of history didn't have it, and the post-antibiotic era won't, either.

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KtheFox t1_j67vxu6 wrote

This isn't 1 drug, or really a drug at all. It's a new way to discover drugs (and potentially other things). Many drugs ultimately come down to the interactions of a certain protein with a living system. Some drugs have proteins that help our cells do their jobs by overcoming some natural deficiency, some fit into the membranes of invading bacteria and break it open, killing it, and some proteins just snap into place and fill up space, to prevent other less desirable things from snapping into place.

In the past we've mostly discovered drugs from other living things in our environment. Aspirin is tree bark, antibiotics come from molds and fungi. As scientific knowledge has built, we've been able to manipulate things more directly.

We can actually figure out the shape of a protein in our cells, say related to some cancer. Scientists can then look for some sort of protein out there in the world that might fit into the problematic protein and stop its bad behavior. They might find a close match, then try to tweak it to make it fit a little better.

This method allows a scientist to test some proteins before even knowing what shape they are. The 'protein language model' can use a huge database of existing proteins we've discovered in living things and studied for years. In this case, they asked it to make an antibiotic for common infections in eggs (a quick and easy thing to test in the lab). It looked at existing proteins that treat those infections, and came up with 100 new ideas for a protein. When the scientists actually tested them, 66 of them worked on the infected eggs. If this were a drug intended for development, the next steps would be testing it on other things, like human cells and gut Flora to see which of these 66 will interfere the least with your body's function.

tl;Dr This method would allow us to discover new useful proteins very quickly, and possibly come up with ideas no human would have. Many of its ideas will not be useful, but some will be. This will actually help us discover treatments that do what we want, like killing 1 kind of bacteria, without killing any other kind.

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