Question About Developing Antibiotic Replacements

[Cory Geesaman]

I had a thought and I'm not sure if it's being done already but would be interested if anyone has any information on the subject.  The underlying logic goes like the following:

• We extract antibiotics initially from lower organisms before refining them (bread mold is a good example here.)
• Bacteria outpace our discovery of new antibiotics because they evolve much more rapidly than our R&D cycle.
• Meanwhile those lower organisms are still around, possibly just because we aren't using antibiotics on the things which effect them.
• Those lower organisms also evolve much more rapidly than our R&D cycles.

So the thought is: What happens if you culture something like Penicillium mold in bulk, and mix it with the strains of bacteria it hates which have been made immune to Penicillin?  If you repeated this enough times with enough mold + bacteria in each batch, would you be likely to see a new form of antibiotic or antibiotic-like mechanism in the Penicillium mold which you might then turn into another useful antibiotic?  Couldn't we solve the issue of antibiotic-resistant bacteria just by using organisms that evolve at near (or mucher nearer than us) the same pace as the bacteria they are trying to fight and/or conferring the genes making the bacteria we dislike to those the lower organisms such as mold dislike?

[Abizar Lakdawalla]

Bacterial viruses, bacteriophages, evolve more rapidly than bacteria. And they infect and kill their Bacterial host ... Russians used bacteriophages as antibacterials in the early 1900s and during the world wars.

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