Archive for toxins
Botulism breakthrough? Taming botulinum toxin to deliver therapeutics
While rare, botulism can cause paralysis and is potentially fatal. It is caused by nerve-damaging toxins produced by Clostridium botulinum — the most potent toxins known. These toxins often lurk in contaminated food (home canning being a major culprit). Infants can also develop botulism from ingesting C. botulinum spores in honey, soil, or dust; the ... Read More
Opioid alternative? Taming tetrodotoxin for precise painkilling
Opioids remain a mainstay of treatment for chronic and surgical pain, despite their side effects and risk for addiction and overdose. While conventional local anesthetics block pain very effectively, they wear off quickly and can affect the heart and brain. Now, a study in rats offers up a possible alternative, involving an otherwise lethal pufferfish ... Read More
Sweet! How C. difficile toxin A enters intestinal cells
Clostridiodes difficile infection has become a leading cause of severe, sometimes fatal diarrheal illness. It flourishes best in hospitals and long-term care facilities where people are on long-term antibiotic treatment, but it’s also an increasing problem in the community. Much of the damage from C. diff is caused by toxins the bacterium produces, which damage ... Read More
New angles for blocking Shiga and ricin toxins, and new light on an iconic biological process
Min Dong, PhD, and his lab are world experts in toxins and how to combat them. They’ve figured out how Clostridium difficile’s most potent toxin gets into cells and zeroed in on the first new botulinum toxin identified since 1969. Now, they’ve set their sights on Shiga and ricin toxins, and not only identified new potential lines of defense, ... Read More
Safety trial of algal anesthetic kicks off
Two years ago, we told the story of the quest of Charles Berde, MD, PhD, of Boston Children’s Division of Pain Medicine, to turn an algal toxin called neosaxitoxin into a long-lasting local anesthetic. At that time, Berde—together with Alberto Rodríguez-Navarro, MD, from Padre Hurtado Hospital in Santiago, Chile, and a Chilean company called Proteus SA—already knew that ... Read More
Science Seen: An intestinal toxin’s trick, a potential cancer fighter
Clostridium difficile, also called “C. diff,” causes severe gastrointestinal tract infections and tops the CDC’s list of urgent drug-resistant threats. In work published in Nature in 2016, Min Dong, PhD, and colleagues found the elusive portal that enables a key C. diff toxin, toxin B, to enter the intestines’ outer cells and break down the ... Read More
Botulism toxin X: Time to update the textbooks, thanks to genomic sequencing
Botulism is a rare, potentially fatal paralyzing illness. It’s the reason we shouldn’t feed infants honey and why we need to take care in consuming home-canned foods: they can potentially contain nerve-damaging toxins produced by Clostridium botulinum. Botulinum toxin is classified as one of the six most dangerous potential bioterrorism agents. There are seven known ... Read More
Building a better botox
Aside from reducing wrinkles, botulinum toxins — a.k.a. botox — have a variety of uses in medicine: to treat muscle overactivity in overactive bladder, to correct misalignment of the eyes in strabismus, for a movement disorder called cervical dystonia that causes neck spasms, and more. Two botulinum toxins, types A and B, are FDA-approved and ... Read More
Mutated botulinum neurotoxin B: A stronger player in the Botox world?
Famously associated with smoothing out wrinkles, botulinum toxin — better known as Botox — has been in use for 40 years now. Initially approved as a treatment for crossed eyes and then facial wrinkles, its on- and off-label uses today extend to urinary incontinence, migraines, perspiration, spasticity and even depression. But the diffusion of the ... Read More
Entry door for deadly C. difficile toxin suggests new mode of protection
Clostridium difficile, also called “C. diff,” tops the CDC’s list of urgent drug-resistant threats. Marked by severe diarrhea and intestinal inflammation, C. diff has become a leading cause of death from gastrointestinal illness, causing half a million infections a year in the U.S. alone. C. diff flourishes best in hospitals and long-term care facilities where people are on ... Read More