By Jon Schiller, ISRAEL21c
While modern medicine has made leaps and bounds in the field of tissue and organ reconstruction over the years, it is still limited by one major drawback: Human beings don’t have spare parts.
If a car-accident survivor needs a reconstructed jaw, for instance, surgeons must build it from a piece of the patient’s fibula bone and the surrounding soft tissue and blood vessels, in a procedure known as autografting.
Autografting takes a heavy toll on the body and can often lead to medical complications.
Prof. Shulamit Levenberg’s bioengineering team at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology has introduced a better way.
May 18, 2021
The team, led by BGU’s Department of Chemistry Prof. Raz Jelinek, and postdoc in his lab Dr. RavitMalishev , tested their molecular tweezers on the Staphylococcus aureus (Staph) bacteria. Staph infections have an estimated mortality rate in the US of over 25%, and as much as 40% for drug-resistant strains. The researchers developed two specific tweezers that bind and either disrupt biofilm formation or break existing biofilms.
“Our discovery prevents infection without building up antibiotic resistance. As such, it might even be preferable to construct treatments based on molecular tweezers rather than antibiotics,” says Prof. Jelinek, who is also Ben-Gurion University’s Vice President of Research & Development and a member of the Ilse Katz Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology. “Importantly, binding the tweezers to the biofilm disrupts its protective capabilities. In consequence, the bacterial pathogens become, on the one hand, much less virulent to
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