Author
MILLER, MARVIN - UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME | |
DARWISH, IHAB - UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME | |
GHOSH, ARUN - UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME | |
RITTER, ALLEN - UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME | |
HANSEL, JAN-GERD - UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME | |
HU, JINGDAN - UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME | |
Budde, Allen | |
NIU, CHUANSHENG - UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME | |
Leong, Sally |
Submitted to: Symposium Series
Publication Type: Proceedings Publication Acceptance Date: 7/15/1996 Publication Date: N/A Citation: N/A Interpretive Summary: Technical Abstract: Antibiotics: "The End of The Miracle Drugs?" This was the headline on the cover of Newsweek, March 28, 1994. As described in the lead articles, and in more scientific detail in several articles in the April 15 1994 issue of Science devoted to antibiotic resistance, the Newsweek headlines were not unfounded sensational journalism, but a real wake up call for an emerging health care crisis. D.E. Koshland's editorial, "The Biological Warfare of the Future", in the same issue of Science ended with the warning "...the days of miracle drugs and universal vaccines are going. A long struggle with a premium on basic research to improve our stratagems and applied research to develop new magic bullets is clearly the prognosis of the future." Indiscriminate use of antibiotics has been responsible for a considerable amount of the widespread development of antibiotic resistance. Microbes have altered their permeability barriers, drug target binding sites or even induced synthesis of enzymes to destroy the antibiotics (e.g., B- lactamases). The research in this paper describes methods for bypassing some of these microbial defense mechanisms by utilizing active transport nutrient (iron) assimilation processes to carry several known and some novel synthetic antimicrobial agents into microbial cells. |