Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add colour to my sunset sky..' Rabindranath Tagore.
This is my blog.
A relatively capsulated collection of sights, sounds, thoughts,
ideas and pieces of knowledge that interest and inspire me.
and with every revolution comes a song
pintrest
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Curiouser and curiouser..
For the better part of a century, antibiotics have given doctors great powers to cure all sorts of bacterial infections. But due to bacteria’s nasty habit of evolving, along with widespread overuse of these drugs, disease-causing bacteria are evolving antibiotic resistance at an alarming rate, making it much harder, and at times impossible, to wipe them out. DARPA, the military’s research agency, is eyeing an innovative solution to the problem: Rather than struggling to make better antibiotics, ditch them altogether. It may be time to start killing bacteria a whole new way.
The agency issued a call for proposals to develop a system of bacteria-beating drugs based on siRNAs, tiny scraps of genetic material that turn genes on and off. The idea is to hitch siRNAs onto a nanoparticle, which can make its way into the bacterial cell. What’s more, DARPA wants siRNAs ”whose sequence and objective can be reprogrammed ‘on-the-fly’ to inhibit multiple targets within multiple classes of pathogens,” meaning they can be easily tweaked and tailored in the lab to combat a new bacteria or virus, be it a naturally emerging disease or a carefully designed bioweapon.
DARPA is known for its audacious research goals - their wish list includes a flying car and genetic surveillance. Do you think they’ll be able to pull this one off?
