Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => Topic started by: thedoc on 01/02/2013 08:09:22
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In a move that will make TB easier to treat, scientists have discovered a hidden hang-out used by the bacterium to evade immune capture or destruction by antibiotics.
Read the whole story on our website by clicking here (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/news-archive/news/1000065/)
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Very interesting.
I wonder how many other microorganisms use a similar method to enter a dormant phase.
CD271is apparently a natural marker on these marrow cells, so one wouldn't want to treat with an anti- CD271 antibody, unless one was also planning a marrow transplant. Perhaps one could do an autologous marrow transplant with cultured uninfected cells. But, such a therapy would be expensive, and not without risk.
However, perhaps one could temporarily block the ABCG2 efflux pump, allowing greater intracellular drug concentrations for the TB medications, as well as other medications.
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Does this mean that the bacteria always live in the bone marrow cells?
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When the body has trouble completely killing off a bacteria, it will wall it off, in graulomas in the lung or cysts.
Very interesting.
I wonder how many other microorganisms use a similar method to enter a dormant phase.
When the body has trouble completely killing off a bacteria, it will wall it off, in graulomas in the lung or cysts in other tissues. This happens to some parasites as well. Soldiers who fought in WW I and II sometimes had infections caught over seas like Schistosoma reactivating 50 years later when their immune system weakened.
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It won't kill the TB if it's quiescent inside a bone marrow stem cell though, will it! That's the whole point of this discovery being so signficant...