Infectious disease

Biomedical/pharma, Infectious disease, Personal/public health, Public health

The discovery of antibiotics fundamentally changed healthcare in the 20th century. Deadly infections suddenly became treatable and millions of lives were saved. But excessive antibiotic use in both healthcare and agriculture has allowed some microbes to become resistant. Resistance has even been reported to last resort treatments, like colistin, in the past few years. With classic antibiotics failing, will trivial infections become deadly again or will we manage to find new solutions? In this two-part series, we will look into some of the fundamentally different therapeutics that are being developed as alternatives to traditional antibiotics. In this second installment, we highlight bacteriophages: are they finally ready to take center stage, nearly 100 years after being discovered?
With almost 20 years of experience, Coris BioConcept knows the world of infectious disease diagnostics inside and out. Their straightforward chromatography-based [...]

Mosquitoes are carriers of a range of crippling diseases, posing an enormous global health burden. Because current methods based on insecticides are inadequate, new tools are urgently needed. Widely different companies are tackling the problem of mosquito control from very different angles; who will be successful in getting a grip on these tiny flying terrors? A view by V-Bio Ventures.

Houston (Texas, USA) has been home to Jeroen Pollet since August 2011. He arrived as a Fulbright scholar; now he is an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), and also the director of the Formulation Development Unit at the Sabin Vaccine Institute & Texas Children`s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development.   In these roles, he develops new vaccines against neglected tropical diseases and studies the interactions of vaccine antigens  with immunostimulatory agents in relation to immune responses and vaccine efficacy.
A first case of colistin resistance has been described in the US. This is troubling news, since colistin is used as a last-resort drug in combating infections with highly antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The intensive use of colistin in the pork industry, mainly in China, is suspected to have caused the development of this resistance. Now, the trait is spreading rapidly; does this herald the beginning of a post-antibiotics era?