IBM researchers have created nanomedicine which can be programmed to kill specific bacteria where antibiotic fails to eliminate it.
The Nanomedicine which are created with biodegradable nano particles will, unlike most antibiotics which attacks the red blood cells to kill the infection, attack the bacteria at it’s membrane instead of the host, i.e any cells it attached to.
They created new types of polymers that could detect and destroy bacteria and infectious diseases like Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, known as MRSA, or staph. Hedrick said the polymers can be built with a great deal of control from organic molecules, which makes them biodegradable.
The lead collaborator at the Singapore group was Yiyan Yang. The new polymers were tested against clinical microbial samples at a medical hospital at Zhejiang University in China. Clinical trials and plenty of other work have to be done before the nanomedicine will be commercially available.
“It’s still a work in progress and is in the early stages,” Hedrick said. “The results are extraordinarily promising at this stage.”
FNATECH 