📰 Former officials, ex-diplomat likely to join Modi Cabinet
Nine new Ministers to ensure delivery ahead of Assembly, LS polls; allies ignored
•Prime Minister Narendra Modi will induct nine new members into his Council of Ministers on Sunday morning, including former head of the Indian delegation at the United Nations Security Council Hardeep Puri, former Home Secretary R.K. Singh, former police commissioner of Mumbai Satyapal Singh and former chief of the Delhi Development Authority K.J. Alphons.
•According to sources, the list also includes Bihar MP Ashwini Choubey, MPs from Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh Gajendra Singh Shekhawat and Virendra Kumar and Karnataka MP Ananth Kumar Hegde. Shiv Pratap Shukla, MP from Uttar Pradesh, is also on the list. The portfolio distribution is yet to be revealed.
•The nine have been invited by Mr. Modi for a breakfast meeting at 9 a.m. at his official residence — 7 Lok Kalyan Marg.
•The swearing-in ceremony will be held at 10.30 a.m. at Rashtrapati Bhawan.
All from BJP
•All the nine are from the BJP; Mr. Puri and Mr. Alphons are not members of Parliament and are expected to find entry via the the Rajya Sabha.
•The aim of the reshuffle and the choice of this mix of former bureaucrats, diplomats and career politicians is to “reinforce the team with 4 Ps — passion, proficiency, and professional and political acumen.”
📰 India, China to put Doklam behind
All eyes on a possible one-on-one meeting between President Xi and Prime Minister Modi
•The ninth summit of BRICS, a grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, will begin here on Sunday. New Delhi and Beijing are unlikely to allow their differences over the Doklam plateau to cloud their support for the emerging economies and the Global South.
•Analysts say that having benefited from open trade and investments, India is unlikely to let geopolitics or its close ties with Washington come in the way of joining China and the emerging economies in fostering a new wave of globalisation.
•Notwithstanding the major points of convergence on a global canvas, a possible one-on-one meeting between President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to give a fresh and positive direction to the pivotal relationship, will be keenly watched. Apart from the emerging countries, the region, including South Asia and the 10-nation Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), would have a special interest in picking new signals shaping New Delhi-Beijing ties.
Indo-Pacific doctrine
•Of late, India’s pursuit of the Indo-Pacific doctrine, focussed on an energetic engagement of the ASEAN and island territories in the Pacific, with a strong Indian diaspora presence, is feeding into the broadening India-China equation. In an e-mailed response to The Hindu , Richard J. Heydarian, a Manila-based academic, said the end of the Doklam crisis showed the “wisdom of great power diplomacy and how despite its overall military and economic superiority, China recognises India’s heft as an emerging peer with its own robust territorial conviction”.
•Highly placed sources engaged in the preparations of the summit highlighted that India opposes any formal docking of China’s Belt and Road Initiative with the BRICS. But India would have no problems in supporting individual bankable projects that are not formally declared a part of the BRI.
•Despite rejection of terrorism, India has been calling for the early endorsement of the U.N. convention of terrorism. The Chinese are opposed to any formulation that would indirectly slam the role of Pakistan in global terrorism.
📰 Nepal, China to discuss OBOR
•Indicating China’s continuous push into South Asia, Nepal will discuss connectivity and trade with Beijing immediately after the end of the BRICS summit, Nepali media reports confirmed on Saturday. The reports came within hours of Kathmandu’s Ambassador to Beijing indicating that Nepal will fast-track bilateral discussions on the One Belt One Road (OBOR) policy of China.
•Deputy Prime Minister of Nepal Krishna Bahadur Mahara will travel to Beijing on September 6 for talks on OBOR. The visit comes days after Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba visited India.
•Setting the backdrop for the visit, Leelamani Paudel, Nepal’s Ambassador to China, said that OBOR would benefit Nepal and the same could also reach India. “OBOR is not a military or strategic initiative. It is a commercial initiative. China’s economic prosperity will benefit Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Nepal, India and Pakistan,” Mr. Paudel said.
•Nepal remained equidistant during the two-month Doklam standoff between India and China though there have been reports of growing pressure on Kathmandu to take a side. “Benefit from China-Nepal cooperation will also reach India,” Mr. Paudel said.
📰 The climate connection to dengue
A study finds that it is possible to forecast the outbreak of the disease
•Given its close link with both temperature and rainfall, it is possible to forecast the outbreak of dengue. But for such forecasting to be effective, it should be based on models specific to different climatic zones in the country, a new study has shown.
Incubation of virus
•Scientists have reached this conclusion after evaluating the relationship of climatic factors to the spread of dengue in different climatic zones in India — Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Kerala. They focussed on changes in a factor called extrinsic incubation period (EIP) of the dengue virus, by taking into account daily and monthly mean temperatures in these areas.
•The EIP is the time taken for incubation of the virus in the mosquito. During this period, after the mosquito draws blood that is rich in viruses, it escapes the gut and passes through the mosquito’s body and reaches its salivary glands. Once this happens, the mosquito is infectious and capable of transmitting the virus to a human host.
•However, climatic conditions play an important role in EIP, the scientists say. Lower temperatures (17-18°C) result in longer EIPs thereby leading to decreased virus transmission. With increasing temperatures, feeding increases because of the enhanced metabolism of the mosquito, leading to shorter EIPs. Even a five-day decrease in the incubation period can hike the transmission rate by three times, and with an increase in temperature from 17 to 30°C, dengue transmission increases fourfold. A further increase in temperature beyond 35°C is detrimental to the mosquito’s survival.
•The study has been jointly done by the Hyderabad-based Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT), the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER), Guwahati, in collaboration with scientists at the University of Liverpool.
•The researchers observed that except for Gujarat, which comprises arid regions, there was a strong correlation between rainfall and dengue numbers. They propose an increase in breeding grounds for mosquitoes as a major reason for this finding.
Disease control
•The study found that Kerala, which is warm (temperature ranges from 23.5 to 30°C) and wet and with short EIPs (9-14 days), experiences the highest number of dengue cases. It has been found that EIP is the shortest during the monsoon season in most States and therefore there is an enhanced risk of dengue during this time.
•Researchers say it is important to take into account the dynamic EIP estimates in different regions in assessing disease burden. “This climate-based dengue forecasting model could help health authorities assess the disease intensity in a geographic region. Based on that they can plan disease-control operations well in advance and optimise the use of resources meticulously,” explained Dr. Srinivasa Rao Mutheneni of IICT, who led the study.
•With changes in temperature affecting the extrinsic incubation period of the virus, future changes in the climate might have a substantial effect on dengue and other vector-borne disease burden in India. “Though such methods are in vogue for disease control operations, we are still in the initial stages of implementation of such strategic control methods,” Dr. Rao said. Factors such as population density and migration also need to be included for future risk assessment studies.
📰 Necessary judgment, but no panacea
The implementation of the triple talaq judgment depends on a more vigorous attempt to tackle issues such as lack of education
•The Supreme Court correctly decided that instant verbal divorce — known as triple talaq, favoured by some Muslims — is arbitrary and ‘un-Islamic’. The decision was balanced, well-considered, and long-overdue. It is a step forward for all open-minded Indians, but credit for it cannot be claimed by men or by any political party: it belongs to a line of brave (Muslim) women, including the five who finally obtained this verdict.
•The judgment is a welcome milestone, though it is also true that many Muslims have never personally known triple talaq. I can think of only one case among hundreds of Muslim family members and friends, and even that was a case of wife-abandonment, which reportedly afflicts Hindus more than Muslims.
•In fact, my immediate family and I were basically unaware that triple talaq could be legally practised, until we saw the 1982 B.R. Chopra hit, Nikaah , featuring some excellent songs by Salma Agha, who also acted in it. I remember that after the film show, we discussed whether triple talaq was really possible: while we knew that it was permitted under Shariah law in India, we thought that this would be the case only if the wife (or ex-wife) did not challenge it in court. If challenged in court, the law of the country would take precedence.
Then and now
•After the Shah Bano maintenance-related case three years later, largely due to meddling by the Congress government of those days, it became clear that this was not so. However, we were not entirely wrong in our general understanding of the matter. For instance, after the Supreme Court judgment finally outlawed triple talaq last month, a functionary of the current BJP government maintained that no new legislation is required. Instead, anyone persisting with the practice of triple talaq can be prosecuted under existing domestic violence laws, he said. This is something like what, back in 1982, we had assumed was the case.
•The other matter to put in context is the nature of triple talaq: there is no evidence that it is a binding centuries-old tradition, as reported in sections of the media, or that it is compulsory in Islam per se. Most Muslim countries do not have triple talaq, and historical records indicate that triple talaq, which might have been a local practice in some parts, was institutionalised in India under the colonial regime with the adoption of the Shariah code only in 1937. Before that, even the colonial legal practice regarding Muslims was seldom Shariah-based: it was largely based on customary law, which was often too contradictory and even more conservative than Shariah law. Hence it was replaced by the Shariah code in 1937.
•The ulema could have continued this tradition, and reinterpreted the Shariah — for it is their job to interpret Islam — in ways that would have made all this drama unnecessary. In doing so, they would have sent out a strong message to the Muslims who listen to them: that the project of India, as a country, is not in opposition to their identity as Muslims. Sections of the Sunni ulema have unfortunately lost a great chance to provide a cohesive and collaborative example to ordinary Muslims, and might even have added to the sense of siege that some Muslims feel today.
•While unnecessary or exaggerated at times, this sense of siege is not always paranoia — because Muslim contributions to Indian history and culture are often dismissed by politicians associated with the BJP. To say that the Taj Mahal is not part of Indian culture or that Urdu is a Pakistani language is to suggest that Muslims do not belong in India. Too many such statements are made in India these days and they are not vigorously challenged by senior BJP leaders who should know better.
Triple talaq and other issues
•At a lesser level, the impression in certain quarters that Muslim men were going about saying ‘talaq, talaq, talaq’ to their successive wives is part of this problem. Most Muslims did not employ triple talaq. But it did afflict hundreds of Muslim women, and it is good this judgment has been passed, finally. I have to say so again, for I know (from Facebook) that not only will I be castigated by some ulema-types for supporting the judgment, but also by certain Hindutva-types for not considering it the solution to all problems of Muslim women.
•No, it is not a panacea for the problems of Muslim women because triple talaq simply did not affect most Muslim women. Other problems did and do, such as lack of health facilities, education and job opportunities. Even the implementation of this judgment depends on a more vigorous attempt to tackle these issues.
•After all, if the government feels, and rightly so, that extant legislation is sufficient and that families still practising triple talaq can be prosecuted under current domestic violence laws, then the government assumes that Muslim women have the education to be aware of their rights, and the economic and social space to go to court against their own families and circles. This, as both Hindu and Muslim wives abandoned by their husbands will attest, is not the case today.
•We still live in a country where 36 innocent people can be killed by those opposing a procedural court conviction for rape!
📰 A milestone in treating cancer
The new therapy turns a patient’s cells into a ‘living drug’ and trains them to recognise and attack the disease
•The United States’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Wednesday approved the first-ever treatment that genetically alters a patient’s own cells to fight cancer, a milestone that is expected to transform treatment in the coming years.
•The new therapy turns a patient’s cells into a “living drug” and trains them to recognise and attack the disease. It is part of the rapidly growing field of immunotherapy that bolsters the immune system through drugs and other therapies and has, in some cases, led to long remissions and possibly even cures.
•The therapy, marketed as Kymriah and made by Novartis, was approved for children and young adults for an aggressive type of leukemia — B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia — that has resisted standard treatment or relapsed. The FDA called the disease “devastating and deadly” and said the new treatment fills an “unmet need”. Novartis and other companies have been racing to develop gene therapies for other types of cancers, and experts expect more approvals in the near future. Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the FDA commissioner, said that more than 550 types of experimental gene therapy were being studied.
Drawbacks and cost
•There are drawbacks to the approach. Because Kymriah can have life-threatening side effects, including dangerous drops in blood pressure, the FDA is requiring that hospitals and doctors be specially trained and certified to administer it, and that they stock a certain drug needed to quell severe reactions.
•Kymriah, which will be given to patients just once and must be made individually for each patient, will cost $475,000 (approximately Rs. 2.8 crore). Novartis said that if a patient does not respond within the first month after treatment, there will be no charge. The company also said it would provide financial help to families who were uninsured or underinsured. Discussing the high price during a telephone news conference, a Novartis official noted that bone-marrow transplants, which can cure some cases of leukemia, cost even more, from $540,000 to $800,000.
•About 600 children and young adults a year in the U.S. would be candidates for the new treatment.
•The approval was based largely on a trial in 63 severely ill children and young adults who had a high rhemission rate of 83% within three months. The treatment was originally developed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and licensed to Novartis. It was identified in previous reports as CAR-T cell therapy, CTL019 or tisagenlecleucel.
•The first child to receive the therapy was Emily Whitehead, who was six and near death from leukemia in 2012 when she was treated, at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Now 12, she has been free of leukemia for more than five years.
Customising Kymriah
•To customise Kymriah for individual patients, white blood cells called T cells will be removed from a patient’s bloodstream at an approved medical centre, frozen, shipped to Novartis in Morris Plains, New Jersey, for genetic engineering and multiplying, frozen again and shipped back to the medical centre to be dripped into the patient. That processing is expected to take 22 days. Novartis said the treatment would be available at an initial network of 20 approved medical centres to be certified within a month, a number that would be expanded to 32 by the end of the year. Five centres will be ready to start extracting T cells from patients within three to five days, the company said.
•Certification is being required because the revved-up T cells can touch off an intense reaction, sometimes called a cytokine storm, that can cause high fever, low blood pressure, lung congestion, neurological problems and other life-threatening complications. Medical staff members need training to manage these reactions, and hospitals are being told that before giving Kymriah to patients, they must be sure that they have the drug needed to treat the problems, tocilizumab, also called Actemra.
📰 ‘Micro factories will enable decentralised manufacturing’
Technology helps derive value from e-waste, says the award-winning professor
•Laureate Professor Veena Sahajwalla , Director, Centre for Sustainable Materials Research and Technology (SMaRT) of University of North South Wales (UNSW) Sydney was recently honoured with the Jubilee Professor award from the Indian Academy of Science, Bengaluru, for her pioneering work in inventing Green Steel from recycled materials and dealing with the problem of electronic waste (e-waste). Now, she, along with her team, is working on micro factories which recycle e-waste generated from end-of-life computers and cell phones and turn them into valuable materials. The Hindu was in conversation with the Mumbai-born professor, who was the first woman to achieve this honour. Excerpts:
How significant is this award?
•The Indian Academy of Science has given this tremendous honour this year and has named me the Jubilee Professor in recognition for scientific research and development on Green Steel which was invented by us. It was not only for development of science but also for the technology.
•As part of the award, the Academy had given me the privilege to travel through the country and meet so many incredible Indians and bright minds at IITs and some in the industry. I am humbled by this honour. The objective is to engage with the scientific community and industry in India.
•The Academy Trust is interested in developing a collaboration with us where e-waste and our micro factory module could become an example for showing to industry and researchers in India how e- waste plastic could be transformed into value added product.
You are the inventor of the micro factory. Can you elaborate?
•Think about how much of electronic waste is created from our computers and phones all over the world and how to monetise and maximise the economic benefit from these end-of-life products. It is not enough to say that we have collected it; we must bring in a technology to transform these materials into economic value. When you convert, you are creating more jobs and economic prosperity. The people who are in the business of collecting, recycling can use the micro factories to create value-added materials. In the long-term, India can benefit enormously.
•We can have access to rare earth oxide (REO) from such electronic waste. But how to get it, is the question. And this is where science can allow us to use e-waste to create value-added materials. The moment you create these materials, you have material security. Now, you can tap into these materials to produce the next generation of products.
Where are micro factories deployed today?
•UNSW has developed the micro factory technology. Our goal has been to handle the problem of e-waste. People have phones and computers even in small towns. At the end of lives of the product, what do you do with them? You have to transport these over long distances for processing and dismantling. Now, either you lose money in transportation or have a micro factory locally, wherever waste is collected. Micro factories will promote decentralised manufacturing. You can have small-scale micro factory operations distributed across the country wherever e-waste might be. If you are a company that wants sensitive data from your hard drive to be completely destroyed, micro factory technology can take care of the destruction of hard drives.
•Besides, the micro factory can take care of the physical material which contains different valuable elements. It also provides data security.
When will it be operational?
•We are building it right now. It will start running early next year. Various modules of the micro factory are already running in our SMaRT Centre. We are now building the physical space for the micro factory. We are building two micro factories. The first will handle e-waste and will be commissioned in the first quarter. The second, a green manufacturing micro factory, will be commissioned in the second quarter. The green factory will process a mixture of materials like glass and plastics. It can make products for the building industry. Flooring can be made out of the mixture. The micro factory can make panels which can be designated for the building environment.
•Small-scale ventures can be set up to supply materials for affordable housing. Though made of waste, these have fantastic properties. It makes the whole house far more affordable. Affordable homes must look beautiful also. Expensive granite in the kitchen can be replaced with panels made out of waste glass.
How long you have been working on the science?
•We have been working for around five years in developing the science. We spent lot of time understanding how these materials can be transformed. We are still working on the scientific development but we have not just stopped at science. We have actually made the products and we have shown the products to our industry partners.
📰 Plastic waste: What man has wrought the bugs try to solve
It is estimated that 60 cities across India generate over 15,000 tons of plastic waste every day and almost 6 million tons per year
•The tiny landlocked African country Rwanda has banned plastic bags since a few years. The ban has made this war-torn nation much cleaner. Kenya has just announced a ban on plastic bags, and a fine of 4 years in prison and/or $40,000. The Kenyan seacoast has mountains of plastic waste, making life on land, and in the sea, difficult. Another African nation, Morocco, with a coastline of 1,800 km, has had such a ban for almost a decade. It is time that India, with its 7,500-km coastline, learns from these Africans and bans plastic bags and related stuff before we too choke our seacoasts—and land, too—into a man-made disaster.
•The Task Force on plastic pollution, set up by the Planning Commission in 2014, estimated that 60 cities across the country generate over 15,000 tons of plastic waste every day—almost 6 million tons per year. This is what we see daily as we walk around the streets. And cattle and other animals, which freely move around the streets, unknowingly devour some of this plastic material, which is not digested but stays put in their stomachs. Ruminants like the cow and buffalo end up dying a slow and painful death. The holy cow meeting an unholy end!
•This dump we see daily is just part of the problem. A much greater, and not so visible disaster looms underwater, a lot of this plastic waste from across the world eventually ends up in the oceans, which cover over 70% of the earth’s surface and hold 97% of the earth’s water. The amount of plastic rubbish reaching the oceans is 8 million tons per day—that is, one truckload every minute. This would mean that by 2050, there will be more plastic in the world’s oceans than fish!
•What can science do about it? An interesting theoretical analysis was recently made by Professor Richard Sole of the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. He estimated that of the huge amounts of plastic thrown in the oceans, the amount floating around is hardly 1%. The rest is sunk way down and/or slowly being degraded or broken down. Which plant, animal or microbe in the ocean might be doing this? And if we identify them, we may have a biological solution to at least part of the problem. The site http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4555014/Plastic-eating-microbes-evolved-ocean.html#ixzz4r7uHOSH2 is well worth visiting to learn more.
Degrading plastic
•There is some interesting research being done towards identifying, isolating and studying the biological species that seem to degrade plastics into small molecules that are usable for safer purposes. The species identified so far are some fungi and bacteria. An elementary review on such ‘biodegradation of plastics’ by A. Muthukumar and S. Veerappanpillai of VIT Vellore lists as many as 32 species of microbes which degrade a variety of plastics which go to make water bottles, carry bags, industrial material and such (see their paper in Intl. J. Pharm. Sci. Rev. Res. 2015; 31 (2:, 204-209; free access). And of immediate relevance to the Indian coastline is a report by Sangeetha Devi and others from Bharathidasan University, Tiruchi, also in 2015 ( Marine Pollution Bulletin, 2015; 96: 32-40, no free access). They found that two strains of the fungus aspergillusspp, found in the waters of the Gulf of Mannar degrade the plastic HDPE (which is used to make milk and fruit juice bottles, grocery bags and such).
•These fungi seem to release some enzymes which degrade HDPE, essentially breaking up the polymeric molecule into smaller pieces; these enzymes are being studied in some detail by the Tiruchi group. It is clear that further research work from marine organisms will reveal more microbes that are capable of degrading polymeric and plastic wastes. It would also be possible to find their cousins on earth which can degrade these wastes. And, once we study the basic biology and genetics of these plastic-eating bugs, we can genetically modify them in order to make them more efficient and versatile in handling a variety of wastes.
•And more data is becoming available on the types of wastes that are being handled by these microbes. In March 2016, a group from Kyoto University found an two enzymes from the microbe they named as Ideonella sakainesis(after the town Sakai in Japan), capable of breaking down the polymer PET (polyethylene terephthalate, used in making packaging trays, polyester clothing and others) into its basic monomeric molecules terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol (S. Yoshida et al., Science 2016; 351: 1196), which are used as building blocks for a variety of chemicals. The microbe is found in soil, sediment, waste water and similar material.
•Most recently, a group of Pakistani, Sri Lankan and Chinese scientists together showed that the fungus Aspergillus tubigensis can degrade yet another major plastic material called polyurethane or PU (Sehroon Khan et al, Environmental Pollution, 2017; 225: 469-480). PU is used in the manufacture of car tyres, gaskets, bumpers, fibres, plastic foam, synthetic leathers and so on. The group found this bug in a general city waste disposal site in Islamabad, which suggests that it would very likely be found at several places in India too.
No place for cynicism
•A cynical wag once said: what science made, let it unmake. It appears that whether it be in water or land (maybe even in the sky), if we work with focus, we would be able to find such plastic waste degrading organisms, and thus try to ‘unmake’ the problem. We can even genetically modify them to suit the purpose. This type of research will bring a great deal of benefit to not only terrestrial life forms but those living under water as well. Ironically enough, work of this kind could even fetch a Nobel Prize for safely breaking down plastics, just as Nobels were given for making plastics in the first place.
📰 Mysterious signals from faraway galaxy
•A mission to explore intelligent alien life in the universe has recorded some mysterious signals coming from a galaxy three billion light years away, according to an Indian-origin scientist working on the ambitious project. Vishal Gajjar is part of the team working under the Breakthrough Listen project — set up by Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner — to discover the truth about the universe.
•“We really have no idea about where they [the recent detected fast radio bursts] come from,” Gajjar, one of the scientists from the University of California Berkeley Research Centre, told The Daily Telegraph.
•He noted: “If some form of life would like to produce a signal that is detectable to another civilisation this could be a way to do it, but I don’t think they are coming from intelligent civilisations.” “There are more theories than the number of sources, ” he said. Explanations for the latest signals detected range from rotating neutron stars with extremely magnetic fields, to energy sources used by extraterrestrial civilisations to power spacecraft.
📰 Novel compounds destroy biofilm-forming bacteria
The species studied included chronic pathogens
•Two new molecules capable of destroying bio-film forming bacteria have been developed by scientists at the Bengaluru-based Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR). The molecules performed better than conventional antibiotics in killing the bacteria during the dormant phase. Biofilms are communities of microorganisms that attach to each other and to surfaces and are able to act as barriers to antibiotics. When used in combination with existing antibiotics, the molecules reduced the microbial burden in the case of burns and surgical wounds.
•The effect of these macromolecules on chronic biofilm causing pathogens like E. coli, Acinetobacter, Klebsiella were studied and the results were recently published in PLOS ONE.
Antibacterial activity
•The researchers studied the effect of the compound on dormant state E. coli. “We tested on E. coli that reside in biofilms in a dormant condition. The new macromolecules killed the bacteria by targeting their cellular membrane, the protective layer present in both active as well as dormant state,” explains Dr. Divakara SSM Uppu at JNCASR and the first author of the article. Antibiotics become effective when the bacteria are in an active state.
•While 100 g/mL of antibiotics (ampicillin and kanamycin) was required to partially kill the bacteria, a concentration of just 10 g/mL of the macromolecule was able to completely kill E. coli. “With the rise of antibiotic-resistant superbugs, it is essential to develop new compounds that can work against them. Our new compound was able to disrupt the cell membrane and kill the bacteria even at very low concentration of 5 g/mL,” says Dr. Jayanta Haldar, scientist at JNCASR and corresponding author of the paper.
•Though the molecule alone was not able to disrupt biofilm, a combination of the molecule with erythromycin in equal concentration caused complete eradication of the tough-to-kill E. coli and Acinetobacter biofilm. Erythromycin by itself was also not able to disturb the biofilm. This showed that the combined strategy worked efficiently compared with individual antibiotics.
Double advantage
•A combination of existing antibiotics (erythromycin) and the macromolecules also showed efficacy in treating burn and surgical wound infections caused by multi-drug resistant pathogens — Acinetobacter and Klebsiella — in animal models.
•Conventional antibiotics were ineffective in the treatment of these infections in mice. However, the combination of macromolecules and the antibiotics could almost completely eradicate the burn and surgical wound infections and facilitate faster regeneration of the epithelial cells and hair follicles in mice models.
•Collectively, these findings show the potential implications of the combination approach for topical treatment of infections. However, detailed animal studies are required further to fully understand the prospects of the molecule.
