Knight-Ridder:
While the Pentagon struggles to deploy a huge antimissile system against a presumed threat from North Korean rockets, biologists are working to develop tiny "antimicrobial" defenses against harmful germs.
Call it "Germ Wars" instead of "Star Wars."
Researchers are turning an ancient set of natural microbe-killers — first discovered on the skin of frogs — into novel weapons to prevent and treat disease.
The new antimicrobial systems are aimed at bacteria that resist antibiotic medicines, a serious and growing problem.
Doctors and hospitals need new tools to fight microbes that overwhelm penicillin, streptomycin and other standard drugs. Infections acquired in hospitals are blamed for 100,000 deaths each year.
But the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Health and Human Services are also interested in antimicrobial research because they want to find better ways to counter the threat of biological terrorism.
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The new approach began about 20 years ago, when Dr. Michael Zasloff, a biochemist and now dean of research at the Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, wondered why frogs, which live in microbe-infested water, never seem to get infected.
The answer, he discovered, was that a frog's skin is covered by a host of short strands of protein that attack and destroy infectious bacteria.
Proteins are complex chemical compounds that make up all living tissues.
Since then, scientists have discovered hundreds of these protein snippets — formally called "antimicrobial peptides" — in creatures as varied as amoebas, insects, scorpions, plants and humans.
Each species, even each organ of the body, seems to have its own arsenal of peptides suited to its environment.
Peptides kill bacteria by rupturing their membranes, or outer coat.
They serve as "the first line of defense" against disease germs, said Greg Tew, a biochemist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.
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