Wednesday 30 March 2016

FIRST LYME DISEASE PULSE-DOSING HUMAN TRIALS WITH MEDICAL SCHOOLS

A new regimen
Lewis and his col­leagues are pro­viding that focus. A sub­pop­u­la­tion of B. burgdor­feri cells, they dis­cov­ered ear­lier, are “per­sister” cells—they are alive but lie dor­mant, in a spore­like state. Because antibi­otics attack only actively func­tioning bac­te­rial cells, per­sis­ters escape the onslaught. How­ever, once the antibi­otic has been flushed from the system, the per­sis­ters “wake up,” says Lewis, dividing and mul­ti­plying until an army of progeny infect the host.
That’s where “pulse dosing” comes in. Lewis’ team, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with researchers studying B. burgdor­feri in mice at Tufts University’s Sackler School of Bio­med­ical Sci­ences, has been ana­lyzing the effect of giving the mice an antibi­otic that kills all the actively func­tioning bac­te­rial cells and then—using the timing that erad­i­cated the pathogen in the test tube—giving addi­tional doses to quash the per­sister cells as they begin to wake up but before they reproduce.
Plans are in the works for the first pulse-​​dosing human trials with med­ical schools.

The above extract is from News at Northeastern go to this link to read the full article:-
 http://www.northeastern.edu/news/2016/03/researchers-investigate-four-promising-new-treatments-for-lyme-disease/
 
'Uni­ver­sity Dis­tin­guished Pro­fessor Kim Lewis, who leads the Lyme dis­ease research team, is now expanding that ther­a­peutic reach with the help of a $1.5 mil­lion grant from the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Foundation.

The team is pur­suing four arms of treatment-​​related research at Northeastern’s Antimi­cro­bial Dis­covery Center, which Lewis directs.

They are: a mouse study of a reg­imen that erad­i­cated the bac­terium in the test tube, set­ting the stage for human trials; antibi­otic cock­tails using existing drugs; strate­gies to dis­cover new drugs that selec­tively target the Lyme bac­terium; and ways to alter the com­po­si­tion of the microbiome—the com­mu­nity of microor­gan­isms inhab­iting the human body—to stop the autoim­mune reac­tions that char­ac­terize the disease.
All four show exciting promise. The grant, Lewis says, “will give us the flex­i­bility to test our approaches in par­allel, which will save us an enor­mous amount of time.”

If Lyme is caught early, patients gen­er­ally recover quickly when treated with antibi­otics, pri­marily doxy­cy­line. How­ever, 10 to 20 per­cent of patients go on to develop a debil­i­tating chronic con­di­tion called Post-​​Treatment Lyme Dis­ease Syn­drome, or PTLDS, with symp­toms that include extreme fatigue, arthritis, muscle pain, and cog­ni­tive difficulties.
I find it amazing that when you show up at the doctor’s office you are not told that there is a 10 to 20 per­cent chance that your life as you know it has ended,” says Lewis. “Nobody seems to be focusing on the next step: How to pre­vent the sub­se­quent rise of the chronic condition.”

Earlier posts on Prof Kim Lewis can be found through this link:-
 http://lookingatlyme.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/borrelia-burgdorferi-lyme-disease-forms.html

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