Mystery of Deadly Last Resort Antibiotic Finally Solved After 70 Years
5 MAY 2021
In the eternal arms race between bacteria and antibiotics, deadly superbugs with resistance to humanity s most vital life-saving medicines continue to emerge and evolve.
It s a growing crisis, but thankfully we are not entirely powerless against the scourge of antibiotic resistance.
In medical scenarios where frontline treatments fail to help patients, doctors can turn to so-called drugs of last resort – treatments set aside until the eleventh hour has come, after prioritized therapies haven t worked out.
Drugs of last resort may be held back for a number of reasons, including side effects, cost factors, patient considerations, and more.
Heinrich-Heine University Duesseldorf
How can a highly effective drug be transported to the precise location in the body where it is needed? In the journal Angewandte Chemie, chemists at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) together with colleagues in Aachen present a solution using a molecular cage that opens through ultrasonification.
Supramolecular chemistry involves the organization of molecules into larger, higher-order structures. When suitable building blocks are chosen, these systems ‘self-assemble’ from their individual components.
Certain supramolecular compounds are well suited for ‘host-guest chemistry’. In such cases, a host structure encloses a guest molecule and can shield, protect and transport it away from its environment. This is a specialist field of Dr. Bernd M. Schmidt and his research group at the Institute of Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry at HHU.
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COVID-19 antibodies still detectable at 12 months
Some COVID-19 survivors infected early in the pandemic still have detectable antibodies against the virus a year later, according to a new study.
US doctors collected blood samples from 250 patients, including 58 who had been hospitalized for COVID-19 and 192 who had not required hospitalization.
Six-to-10 months after diagnosis, all of the former inpatients and 95% of the outpatients still had neutralizing antibodies, according to a report posted on Sunday on medRxiv ahead of peer review.
In the small subset of those followed for a full year, 8-of-8 people who had been hospitalized still had antibodies, as did 9-of-11 former outpatients. Antibody levels at the time of follow-up were correlated with age and with COVID-19 severity.