In 1928 Alexander Fleming revolutionised infection control with the discovered penicillin. Penicillin transformed the medical treatment and altered history as many who would have previously died of infection lived longer lives to impact there family and society around them.

But as penicillin became commonplace and readily available the abuse of the substance reduced its ability and effectiveness. To maintain medicines ability to effectively combat infections the pharmaceutical companies had to search far and wide coming up with penicillin A, penicillin B … penicillin x.. and still more superbugs appeared.

The abuse of these substances have reached a level where well meaning soap companies are putting them in hand wash which is ridiculous because to be effective you would have to keep the soap on your hands for 20 minuets to work as well as proper hand washing technique.

Other forms of abuse included feeding it to healthy chickens to prevent them from getting sick and it also seem to make them grow faster. Then we eat the chickens introducing the penicillin into our system at very low levels. Our bodies and the land that the chicken manure was dumped on gave exposure to a plethora of microbes that learned to deal with the poison.

In a classical experiment a researcher took a common bacteria and grew it in a media. Once he had a healthy bloom they treated the bacteria with a low dose of penicillin. After treatment there was no visible bacteria. They cleaned up the penicillin and gave the bacteria what they needed and with time he had a healthy bloom again. Next time he gave the bacteria recommended penicillin dose. Again the bacteria died off. they cleaned up and gave the bacteria the normal growth media and with time another healthy bloom appeared. So he treated the bacteria with a dose of 10 times the penicillin and instead of dying the bacteria used the penicillin as a food source and continued to thrive.

Knowing this I was delighted when I found Bioniche and its newly minted researcher with a new approach to disease process. Their approach was to give an immune response to infection. By making the body recognize the invaders signature the body could attack the invader and reducing the need for biocides. Not only could it be effective on pathogens but the approach could be used on diseases that had no effective treatments such as cancer. They could extract a few cells of a cancer but then collect part of the cell wall and mark them with a protein then re-inject them back into the body. They would attach themselves to the offending cells but now the bodies immune response would recognize the cell as alien and produce a normal immune response killing the cell and releasing the marker to attach to the next cell. Once all the cells were killed the protein would be excreted.

The response had been tested in lab rates and shown to be effective on a variety of cancers including prostrate cancer and ovarian cancer which is extremely aggressive. They went so far as to mastize the ovarian cancer and inject it into a rat and instead of the rat being dead within a couple days the rates with the treatment were cancer free.

I had visions of sugar plums and great humanitarians being honoured with Nobel prizes in the future and so I bought into the dream. They had in those days a list of future products that could be sold. Included were a variety of food poisoning bacteria and cancers.

Bioniche picked two high profile produces that could make some money and demonstrate the technological advancement to take to market. These products were the E. coli O157:H7 vaccine and the MCC for bladder cancer. The plan was to be in the market before 2008.

Over time the old information disappeared and costs kept going up. Now we seem to have the boards filled with Johnny come latelys, that seem to know little or nothing but how to bash the integrity of some hard working visionaries that may be able to make a difference. Management are intelligent they are backed by some very bright scientists but market forces and the fact that this is new and unproven technology is seriously delaying the introduction.

What is needed is some serious business knowhow to take it the last steps. I am not sure that the present board has what it needs to complete the task.

Ok I think I have to get back to work. Darn.

Bit