Facebook’s initial public offering, plagued by trading errors and a 16 percent drop in the share price, will push more individual investors out of a stock market they already distrust after the financial crisis.IBM is developing a technology that searches out drug-resistant germs in the body and destroys them, addressing a $34 billion-a-year public health problem.
Engineers based at IBM’s San Jose, Calif., facility have created nanoparticles 50,000 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair that can obliterate the cell walls of drug-resistant bacteria. The structures then harmlessly degrade, leaving no residue, according to a study describing the work in the journal Nature Chemistry.
When antibiotic drugs are used to attack a colony of bacteria, they sometimes leave behind survivors that become resistant to the medicine’s future use.
These germs kill 100,000 U.S. hospital patients a year, according to the Infectious Disease Society of America.
IBM’s technology “goes outside the scheme of current antibiotics to something that physically destroys bacteria,” said Mario Raviglione, chief of the World Health Organization’s Stop TB department, in a telephone interview.
“If this is proven to work in humans, it will simply revolutionize the way we deal with antimicrobial treatment.”
Traditional antibiotics interfere with bacterial DNA to neutralize or prevent them from replicating.
The nanoparticles, made of biodegradable plastic, were engineered to have a specific electrical charge that draws them to the oppositely charged bacteria. Tests in laboratory dishes confirmed that they have the ability to destroy the cells. They also caused no harm in separate tests in mice, the research found.
The technology was designed by an IBM team led by James Hedrick that collaborated with scientists at the Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore. The scientists specifically aimed the nanoparticles at methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, a widely circulating strain of drug-resistant bacteria.
IBM is now talking to pharmaceutical companies to prepare the particles for human testing, Hedrick said.
The nanoparticles “rip holes in the membrane walls and the contents basically spill out,” said Hedrick, a researcher at IBM’s Almaden Research Center.
