Why Research Alternatives to Antibotics?

So many people take antibiotics without understanding the dangers of doing so. Such dangers include dysbiosis (yeast overgrowth), increased food allergies, and weight gain. Another issue is the fact that antibiotics are used to treat Clostridium difficile, a bacterium that causes almost indistinguishable symptoms from Crohn’s Disease, which can then contribute to the recurrence of this bacteria. Recurrence means that the bacteria doesn’t go away and, in fact, grows more.

I’m not saying that people should stop taking antibiotics; there are many benefits of prescribing antibiotics when a patient is sick. It’s the amount and the frequency of taking antibiotics that should be reassessed.

Taking antibiotics kills a certain amount of good bacteria, while leaving behind resistant germs to multiply. Doing this over and over again leads to antibiotic-resistant bacteria, making the patient susceptible to even worse versions of the bacteria already infecting him or her. There should be research, resources, and money should be allocated to the research of alternative treatments for illnesses, especially treatments for C. diff.

There are many labs and biotech startups that are researching alternatives to antibiotics. Some current alternatives to antibiotics include fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), and antitoxin antibodies. FMT is a procedure where the feces of people with healthy bacteria is mixed with saline and placed in the affected patient by either colonoscopy, enema, endoscopy, or sigmoidoscopy. The idea behind an FMT is that the good bacteria of one person replaces the infected bacteria of the patient with C. diff or colitis. While this seems undesirable, the results are very promising. This procedure is very common in China and has gained popularity and interest in the US for its highly effective, low-cost and low-risk outcome. Antitoxin antibodies are created by injecting either humans, animals, plants, or bacteria with a safe amount of a specific toxin, letting the human/animal/plant/bacteria make the antitoxin needed to neutralize the injected toxin. This antitoxin is then removed and used in another human or animal. Antitoxin antibodies are safer than antibiotics because each antitoxin is specifically used to cure one thing, minimizing the amount of good bacteria that gets killed in the process of killing the bad bacteria.

While these two methods of treating C. diff are effective, there are still issues that need to be resolved before they become foolproof ways of eliminating antibiotics. Research currently being conducted by NIMML, the Nutritional Immunological Molecular Medicine Laboratory at the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech, is well on its way to making these two alternatives (and hopefully many others) a first choice in treating C. diff as opposed to antibiotics. The research to prove the efficacy of FMT and antitoxin antibodies is mainly creating “trials” to simulate the outcomes of such trials. Being that it’s difficult to collect data for certain trials, these simulated trials are an integral part of the research. To simulate such trials, NIMML is using machine learning algorithms to create “patients” with variations in their genes. These variations can display which aspects of the trial cause the most change, which will in turn enable more accurate outcomes, and eventually develop a cure to C. diff.