Prof. Sidney Altman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, a partner in the development of antibiotics that work against resistant bacteria, criticizes the pharmaceutical companies that are reluctant to use this method because its application would be too expensive for them. Prof. Altman lectured to hundreds of gifted students from all over the world who participated in the WSCI conference last week in Jerusalem
Prof. Sidney Altman, Professor of Molecular Biology, and Cell and Developmental Biology at Yale University. Altman is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1989 together with Thomas Czech for researching the catalytic properties of RNA "Catalytic RNA" is currently partnering with a number of other scientists in the development of antibiotics that work against resistant bacteria, criticizes the pharmaceutical companies that prevent them from using the method he co-developed And which can restore antibiotic sensitivity to bacteria and parasites that have developed resistance, because its application would be too expensive for them. Prof. Altman lectured in front of hundreds of gifted students from all over the world who participated in the WSCI conference last week in Jerusalem. The conference was attended by hundreds of science and math geniuses from 75 countries, and 15 brides and grooms of the Nobel Prize in Science and the Fields Medal in Mathematics.
Already in the summary he published before his arrival, Altman criticizes the pharmaceutical companies: "Today's antibiotic drugs have a limited lifespan and are defeated due to the rapid development of bacteria and parasites that are resistant to them. New technology designed to develop long-life antibiotic drugs is urgently needed. We use new compounds that eliminate many strains of bacteria and the malaria parasite. Pharmaceutical companies are very slow to produce new products because they prefer profit over altruism.
"The resistance of bacteria and certain strains of the malaria parasite to the drugs that are in use today is a worldwide problem, the fact that in Western Europe and North America many articles describing the severity of the problem have been published in the last year or two. If we do not overcome the inevitable resistance of the bacteria to these drugs, we will return to the era before 1930 when there were no drugs at all to treat bacterial infection."
Francis Crick already explained in the fifties and sixties the process that takes place inside the cells when the DNA is translated into RNA and back. The RNA binds to the ribosome, and there the information stored in it is translated into proteins and then this information is fixed and cannot be transferred anywhere else. In the last decade we know that there is not one type of RNA but many types, and each one has a different role within the cell. We discovered that there are also ncRNAs - RNA molecules that are not translated into proteins. They have an important role in controlling processes inside the cell and in the differentiation process that determines whether the cell will become a hair or skin cell, for example."
"The problem of bacterial resistance to antibiotics has several sources. The first is the over-prescription of drugs by doctors for many diseases. If you have a cold and you go to the doctor and the doctor gives you antibiotics it is a mistake. We do not know of any antibiotics that treat colds. Colds are caused by viruses. Many of the drugs in use today have suffered from overuse. The second problem, mainly in the Muslim world, but also in other parts of the world, is the feeding of farm animals - cattle, poultry and pigs with a huge amount of antibiotic drugs to prevent the animal from contracting diseases. This causes the spread of bacteria in populations that would otherwise not be infected. In other third world countries, pharmaceutical companies provide antibiotics in off-the-shelf medicines. It is very easy to get antibiotic drugs and use them and this is how we prepare the bacteria to acquire resistance. Finally, the source of profit for the pharmaceutical companies, except in a few countries where it is easy to sell drugs and they generate profits, does not come from the current drugs. Of course, this is a profit center in itself, but most of the revenue and profits of the pharmaceutical companies come from the development of new drugs to treat terminal diseases, such as for example various types of cancer."
(Editor's note, Prof. Ada Yonat, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, said similar things at the Life Science Baltics conference in 2012. She explained simply that antibiotics are taken for a short period of time, while drugs for chronic diseases are taken for decades, therefore pharmaceutical companies prefer to invest in them rather than antibiotics. A.B.).
And Altman continues: "The pharmaceutical companies say that their goals are profit first and altruism second. They claim that the division between the two goals is equal. I don't think so, in my estimation, the goal of profit has a weight of 90% and altruism only 10%."
In Russia, it was reported in the 70s that in many hospitals up to 75% of tuberculosis patients carried bacteria resistant to antibiotics designed to eliminate the micro-bacteria (such as the tuberculosis bacterium). In Israel the data are quite similar to those of the USA and Western Europe. In Thailand, for example, there is a large rate of resistance to tuberculosis and malaria, about XNUMX% of the carriers of the bacteria are resistant to drugs. Plasmodium, the malaria parasite, infects about 2 million people a year, of which 600 thousand die every year, mostly women and children.
"An article written by Xiao and his colleagues and published in PLoS Medicine in 2013, demonstrates the number of deaths that occurred in China, the European Union and the United States in 2012 due to bacterial drug resistance. 80 thousand die in China, 25 thousand throughout the European Union and 23 thousand in the USA. We spread large numbers of bacteria into the environment, and random mutations of the bacteria's DNA coding. People became drug resistant when the bacteria they carried became drug resistant.
How do bacteria become resistant to antibiotics?
"The DNA - the two-stranded molecule consists of sequences of four bases (monomers) called T, C, G and A. Several chemical processes involving the monomers can change their nature in different ways. For example A in one position is changed through chemical reactions and replaced by C. Such a tiny change can make the bacterial cell resistant to the presence of a certain drug. A single mutation can change a cell's DNA and make it resistant to drugs."
"I have been researching for many years an enzyme that cuts the messenger RNA molecule at the point where I am interested in this disconnect, by damaging hydrogen bonds which are weak bonds that participate in many phenomena in nature. We can take any RNA in any cell, read its sequence, and another molecule called the External Guide System (EGS) cuts the RNA at any point we want. By using EGS we can get rid of most of the expression of the gene encoding the specific RNA. We are using the method to develop a new type of antibiotic. By reducing the expression of the gene that codes for a protein that causes our cells to be resistant or sensitive to antibiotics. We look for the antibiotic-resistant cells and make them sensitive to the drugs again. We use an RNA derivative and not natural RNA because natural RNA has a tendency to break down quite quickly inside and outside the cell. "
Description of the method for restoring sensitivity to bacteria
"Although our new method of reducing the resistance of cells to antibiotics works well, pharmaceutical companies are still working with old methods and producing drugs similar to existing drugs that rely on a single mutation to avoid resistance. The 'agent' we developed required at least three mutations before the cell became sensitive to the drug. If we live in populations where many bacteria are present, it will take two years for bacteria to develop resistance to conventional drugs. With our method, it will take at least 8-6 years for mutations to appear, and there will be enough time to find workarounds.
"We tested the effect of the substance on several types of bacteria, including the most common resistant bacteria in hospitals, MRSA. We can show that a very small number of bacteria remain alive after our treatment. We grew a culture of bacteria in the laboratory, added the substance we developed and saw how many of them remained after six hours and how many died and the success was great."
The sequence we are targeting with the EGS is part of an enzyme known as gyrA which is essential for the DNA replication process of many bacteria. If we take Plasmodium, the malaria parasite, as an example. The life cycle of Plasmodium is as follows: a mosquito carries the parasite in its blood, when the mosquito bites a person, the parasite penetrates and spreads through the body through the liver and finally it reaches the red blood cells. The red blood cells have no DNA at all but when the parasite is present the only DNA there is the DNA of the parasite. When another mosquito bites the same person, the blood cells containing the parasite are transferred to him and the cycle continues. We were able to develop a medicinal process in which we focus on the gyrA gene - of the parasite, and thus we were able to eliminate the Plasmodium and stop its spread. "
"The drug most widely used in Southeast Asia against malaria today is artemisinin, a compound derived from a plant product in China. In the last two or three years, we have seen that artemisinin resistance has increased. This is a very big public health problem. The question is what can we do."
"It is essential that we change the perception of the pharmaceutical companies so that they develop new agents that will neutralize bacteria and parasites resistant to antibiotics. Producing the drugs using the method we developed on a mass scale may be 4-3 times more expensive than developing drugs of the type that exists today. But if we want to cure a million people a year in Southeast Asia, and allow them to live, it is worth spending 3-2 million dollars more to do so (I assume he meant billions AB). This is the important message of my lecture."
For the video recording the lecture on the WSCI conference website from the 20th minute
More of the topic in Hayadan:
- The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: We have reached the end of the antibiotic era
- Prof. Ada Yonat: "The reluctance of pharmaceutical companies to develop new antibiotics for economic reasons could set us back decades when it comes to life expectancy"
- A new type of antibiotic will eliminate bacteria that are resistant to existing drugs
9 תגובות
Just a small note. From the last word in the sentence "Francis Crick already explained in the fifties and sixties the process that takes place inside the cells when the DNA is translated into RNA and back" it can be understood as if the RNA is translated back into DNA.
Father, how exactly is there no income from vaccines?
You should try to reduce costs
There is a serious problem due to the fact that treatments that cannot be registered as a patent are not of interest to pharmaceutical companies. For example, bacteriophages are viruses that prey on bacteria. In Russia, there was a lot of work with bacteriophages and they found ones that could overcome bacteria that cause life-threatening diseases. But what - with the collapse of the Soviet empire there were power cuts in hospitals and all cultures died. The pharmaceutical companies in the West do not touch the issue because it is impossible to get a patent on a bacteriophage because it is a virus found in nature. The governments do not interfere either because all over the western world there are strong capital-government ties.
To Tam's question. The answer is no. A. Because there is no income in vaccines, and b. The second problem is not only related to the pharmaceutical companies, but to the nature of capitalism and its radicalization in recent years, which results in the erasure of the middle class and the takeover of the economy by large companies, while determining the laws tailored for them.
Feeding farm animals, and also bees, with antibiotics is also done in Israel and not only in the Muslim world or the third world, unless we are also in the third world. There is a tendency to hide it, but every farmer knows the truth.
Doesn't the article actually reinforce all the conspiracy stories we hear about the pharmaceutical companies? (for example on the subject of vaccines) it implies that the financial profits are really much more important to these companies than the health and suffering of the poor patients.
I'm wrong ?
It is time for governments to take charge of drug and vaccine development
for the diseases that may turn into an epidemic. In the end it is an interest
theirs and perhaps also a global interest.