Resistant bacterial infections and human immune system disorders may one day be conquered with the help of alligator blood.
After a lifetime of fascination with and study of crocodilians, Mark Merchant of McNeese State University has focused his research on the antibacterial power of alligator serum.
Merchant knew from what he had seen that the alligator’s immune system far surpassed that of humans, so he began investigating the “mechanism of action” behind this phenomenon.
Experiments using alligator serum (a component of the blood that is left after the coagulants and the blood cells are removed) gave an indication that he was looking in the right direction.
A simple experiment of placing a drop of the serum in a petri dish of bacteria demonstrated its powerful effect as an antibiotic by killing all the bacteria exposed to it.
Unfortunately, because of the size of its cells, the serum cannot be safely injected into human blood veins at the risk of anaphylactic shock — the body would recognize it as foreign, triggering a massive allergic response.
However, a drug synthesized to match the serum’s chemical makeup could still have topical applications including treatment of burn victims, diabetics, AIDS patients and others who suffer from skin lesions that are difficult to heal, Merchant said.
But the research wasn’t over there — they just needed to go deeper.
“We turned our interest to the white blood cells,” he said.
They found that a tiny protein or peptide within the white blood cells also acts as a powerful antibiotic.
He and his researchers found these proteins have a strong positive charge. Bacteria have a strong negative charge on their outer wall, so the two are drawn together like magnets.
They bind by electric attraction, and the protein kills the bacteria by rupturing its outer wall.
Merchant believes this is a breakthrough that could lead to “a whole new class of drugs with an entirely different mechanism,” though he cautioned “this isn’t without potential problems.”
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