A PROMISING NEW TREATMENT for antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Faster, please?

Though I wonder if it works against those bacteria that form biofilms?

UPDATE: Derek Lowe emails that this doesn’t look so promising — though at least my biofilm point made sense which, given how long it’s been since I studied this stuff, is a relief:

Had a look at that Speculist/Wired News piece, followed by a perusal of the Oculus web site. Not too many details there for a chemist, so I searched for their IP, and found their patent WO03048421, which shows up assigned to Oculus in its European filing. That gave me more to go on.

I’m not all that impressed. This seems to have very little relation to the nanotube punctures that you wrote about a few months ago, despite the Speculist lead-in, and the Oculus PR doesn’t make much sense, either. Their statement in the Wired article is:

“the ion-hungry water creates an osmotic potential that ruptures the cell walls
of single-celled organisms, and out leaks the cell’s cytoplasm. Because
multicellular organisms — people, animals, plants — are tightly bound, the
water is prevented from surrounding the cells, and there is no negative impact”

Which is semi-gibberish. Talking about “ion-hungry” water that kills through osmosis makes it sound like it’s some sort of ultrapure stuff, but their water has plenty of ions in it, since the electrolysis that produces it makes hypochlorous acid, hydrochloric acid, and so on. Those are surely the source of its bacteria-killing properties, which would then be done through good ol’ toxic chemistry. And that “tightly bound” stuff isn’t too compelling, either – so it’ll just mess up your cells that it can get to, is my take on that, and won’t touch bacteria that are embedded in a matrix or biofilm.

And the possibility for dosing this stuff in vivo is zero, by the way, for those same reasons.

Dang. I would rather this be a sure winner, alas.