New Treatments On The Horizon?
If your car breaks down you take it to expert mechanics to be fixed. Not knowing exactly what is wrong they can try replacing the ignition switch, or changing the fuel filter, or changing the spark plugs. If that doesn't work they can replace the battery cables, or change the timing belt, or replace the alternator. Good mechanics don't give up, they keep trying until they get it right.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) could never be considered to be "good mechanics" when it comes to Lyme disease. Rather than do all they could have to help you get on the road again, they dilly-dallied around while helping themselves to patents, vaccine interests and becoming best friends with insurance companies.
They even went so far as to testify at legislative hearings and in court against you and your doctors simply because you had the nerve to want the self-appointed experts to fix the Lyme problems plaguing you and the rest of the nation.
While you begged for help from those who controlled the purse strings and therefore, the progress toward a cure, they launched a campaign against Lyme patients and published in medical journals and other forms of media to make you and your doctors appear both wicked and crazy.
When good mechanics call auto parts suppliers they don't get the specified part then spend years trying to decide if the fuel line, for example, in studies that they are paid to perform can be confirmed to be a fuel line. They don't, unlike the CDC/IDSA, waste your time and money while the car sits in disrepair and ignore you while kissy-facing with new car salesmen and owners of Taxi cab and Trolley car companies for their percentage of the profits when you are forced to go their way.
Good mechanics work and try, and work and try. In comparison, the CDC/IDSA sits back blasting the same people they were sworn to help. They wait in anticipation for good mechanics to publish new findings so they can pounce on them before the ink in their journal article dries. They get a high by kicking sick patients in the head for wanting more bang for their buck.
In walks the heroes, the ones who have common sense and scientific knowledge, and who are willing to use it to help those who suffer. See selected excerpts from the new studies below regarding new treatments on the horizon.
Emerging Microbes and Infections
http://www.nature.com/emi/journal/v4/n6/full/emi201531a.html
Citation: Emerging Microbes & Infections (2015) 4, e31; doi:10.1038/emi.2015.31
Published online 3 June 2015
Identification of new compounds with high activity against stationary phase Borrelia burgdorferi from the NCI compound collection
OPEN
Jie Feng, Wanliang Shi, Shuo Zhang and Ying Zhang
Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA
Correspondence: Y Zhang, E-mail: yzhang@jhsph.edu
Received 20 March 2015; Revised 22 April 2015; Accepted 8 May 2015
Consistent with our previous results,12 the currently used Lyme antibiotics had poor activity against the stationary phase B. burgdorferi persisters, and the bacteria treated with the two antibiotics still had 75% and 76% viable cells remaining, respectively, compared with 93% viable cells in the drug-free control (Table 1).
Of the 2526 compounds in the NCI compound library collection tested, 237 were found to have higher activity against B. burgdorferi persisters than doxycycline and amoxicillin in the primary screen.
In addition to 11 clinically used drugs (daunomycin 3-oxime, dimethyldaunomycin, daunomycin, nogalamycin, pyrromycin, chaetochromin, prodigiosin, mitomycin, nanaomycin, and dactinomycin), we found 19 non-medicinal compounds that showed good activity against stationary phase B. burgdorferi to varying levels (Table 1, Figure 1).
The top six anthraquinone compounds with residual viable cells ranging from 6% to 15% were more active than daptomycin, which had 18% residual viable cells when using the seven-day-old stationary phase culture (Table 1). Meanwhile, these compounds also had very good activity (low MIC) against growing B. burgdorferi (Table 2).
Anthraquinones are a class of naturally occurring phenolic compounds isolated from Streptomyces and have diverse medical uses, including anti-cancer, antimalarial, and laxative. Anthracycline antibiotics, such as daunomycin, nogalamycin, pyrromycin, and rhodomycin A, are used in chemotherapy for some cancers, especially for several types of leukemia.23 Anthracycline drugs have antibacterial activity against S. aureus, and the MICs of daunomycin and doxorubicin are 8–32 μg/mL and 0.12–0.5 μg/mL, respectively.24 Daunomycin did not show bactericidal activity for gram-negative bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Klebsiella pneumoniae, and E. coli.18 Our study is the first to demonstrate the activity of this class of anthraquinone compounds against both growing and non-growing forms of B. burgdorferi.
It is possible that fatty acid synthesis plays a role in B. burgdorferi persister formation, and future studies are needed to confirm this possibility.
Emerg Microbes Infect. 2014 Jul; 3(7): e49.
Published online 2014 Jul 2. doi: 10.1038/emi.2014.53
PMCID: PMC4126181
Identification of novel activity against Borrelia burgdorferipersisters using an FDA approved drug library
Jie Feng,1 Ting Wang,1 Wanliang Shi,1 Shuo Zhang,1 David Sullivan,1 Ying Zhang1, et. al.
1Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA
2Fisher Center for Environmental Infectious Diseases, School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA
*E-mail: ude.hpshj@gnahzy