It’s a staggering statistic. Covid has killed almost seven million worldwide. The number is likely higher.

Meanwhile, a potentially deadlier pandemic sweeps the planet: bacterial infections antibiotics can’t cure.

According to a recent report in the medical journal The Lancet, in 2019, drug-resistant bacterial infections were linked to five million deaths worldwide. One and a quarter million were directly attributable to drug-resistant bugs.

A 2014 UK government study warned that, by 2050, anti-microbial resistance, or AMR, could kill ten million annually.

As with Covid, drug-resistant bacterial infections aren’t equitable. The most marginalized are the hardest hit – in North America and globally.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have identified eighteen drug-resistant bacterial species, assigning them to three threat categories — “urgent,” “serious” and “concerning.” Among the urgent threats:

• Gut bacterium Clostridium difficile causes potentially fatal diarrhea among a half million Americans each year, and kills 15,000, at an estimated billion-dollar cost to the health care system. Almost four billion could be saved over five years by countering the C. difficile threat, the CDS says.
  

• Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (Klebsiella, E. coli) are responsible for 9000 drug-resistant infections annually, and 600 deaths, particularly within US health facilities. Blood-borne infections have a fifty percent mortality rate. “CRE have become resistant to all or nearly all the antibiotics we have today,” the CDE says.
  

• Acinetobacter baumanii, a highly pathogenic Gram negative bug associated with hospital-acquired infections, that has developed numerous ways to resist antibiotics. Among these, pumping antibiotics out, as soon as they enter the bacterial cell.
  

Drug resistance is the inevitable result of antibiotic overuse or misuse – to treat viral infections, for example. What doesn’t kill infectious bacteria makes them stronger. So, science searches for new ones.

The trouble is, Big Pharma isn’t interested. There’s no profit to be made developing drugs that will end up on the top shelf, reserved for emergencies, when no other drug will work. Big Pharma wants to produce drugs that billions will use, all the time – precisely how antibiotics can’t be used, or else they’d become useless!

So, academic researchers are picking up the slack. At McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, a team of scientists are screening thousands of hopeful candidates — totally new kinds of antibiotics, that bugs have never seen, and are unlikely to become resistant to.

As a target bug for the their drug screening, they’ve chosen Acinetobacter baumanii.

And, for hot tips on what works against Acinetobacter, they’re turning to artificial intelligence, neural networks and machine learning.

Jon Stokes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the button above, or go here.

Jon Stokes (courtesy McMaster University)

Since ancient times, nothing has fascinated human beings more than the diversity of life around them. Aristotle was among the first natural historians. Naturalis Historia, by Pliny, is the Roman Empire’s largest surviving work.

The identification and description of living things has come a long way since ancient Greece and Rome. Today, biologists use DNA barcodes to identify living creatures.

a DNA barcode is a small segment of an organism’s genome that’s characteristic for that species. A half-dozen standardized barcodes exist for different groups of organisms. COX1 is used to identify animals. Botanists use a chloroplast gene. The ‘Internal Transcribed Spacer’, or ITS barcode, is used to identify fungi.

Bacteria have their own barcodes too.

Within any broad group, that standard barcode varies from species to species. A digital device reads it, just like a supermarket scanner reads the barcode on a can of soup or a roll of toilet paper. Predictably, DNA barcode readers are getting small.

Here’s a story about DNA barcoding. Listen to it in today’s podcast. Click on the button above, or go here.

Sandra Witelson (David Kattenburg)

Men are from Mars, women from Venus, John Gray famously wrote, back in the nineties. Science says it’s true – sort of: male and female brains are wired differently.

So says Sandra Witelson, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry & Behavioural Neurosciences at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario. Witelson has been studying the human brain for years, with a collection of over a hundred brains, and brain parts, in bottles of formalin. Albert Einstein’s was the first.

The differences between male and female grey matter, especially in the language and speech regions, interest Witelson greatly. Witelson’s studies revolve around brain lateralization — anatomical and functional differences between people’s right and left cerebral hemispheres just above the ears.

Male plasma testosterone levels before and after birth

And, how male brains get sexualized. At the peak of their second trimester of gestation, male embryos get doused in testosterone, changing them and their brains forever.

Listen to our conversation with Sandra Witelson in today’s podcast. Click on the button above, or go here.