I made a thing!

[liv]

So, to break up the all pandemic all the time posts: I spent most of March getting my first big project at work over the line. I and my team have just released a FutureLearn MOOC. Behold: Antimicrobial Resistance in Bacterial Pathogens.

It's not completely unrelated to the pandemic, because it's about using genomics methods to detect and avoid antibiotic resistance, and track outbreaks of infectious diseases, albeit bacterial rather than viral. It turned out the timing was quite fortuitous, because the whole world is under lockdown and lots of people have time for taking online courses and interest in epidemics and outbreaks.

So slightly under halfway through the course, we have 5000 sign-ups, from basically every country in the world except places like North Korea and Turkmenistan that don't let people access the internet. And we got a personal message of congratulations from the head of section for making such an awesome course.

On the other hand the timing was slightly disastrous because two weeks before launch the lead educator had to drop out of working on the course and go off to run the national Covid-19 sequencing effort. The rest of the team pulled together in very trying circumstances, more than just the general lockdown and emergency, they're all more or less directly involved in clinical-related work on the pandemic. But the last few weeks have been intense, to say the least.

You're welcome to have a go if you like. It's completely free as in beer - we're funded by the Wellcome Trust so we pay for everybody to have premium access to the course. It's quite technical though; our target audience was basically people who are already working in the field of antibiotic resistance but want to learn about modern cutting edge techniques. If you have college-level science and a general interest it should be fine, and we do have a bunch of keen secondary school students who are desperate for something to learn while public exams are cancelled.

If you are excited about it but it's a bit too technical, there is a companion course called Disease outbreaks and antimicrobial resistance. Which I didn't really work on directly, it all happened before I joined the institution, but it's still part of the portfolio of courses I manage.

Comments

[angelofthenorth]

Congratulations!

[naath]

yay you made a thing!

[liv]

Thank you for helping! Your name is on my thing too, albeit way down at the bottom of the end credits where not that many people will read.

[naath]

only a tiny little bit. It's very interesting, rather beyond me alas.

[watersword]

Congratulations on the thing you made! It looks nifty.

[asher553]

Congratulations! This is very exciting and certainly timely. I'm curious to know - if it can be answered in layperson's terms - what are the similarities or differences between viral and bacterial resistance?

Tangentially related, I was just thinking this morning about how fortunate and rare a thing it is to have had a childhood largely free of serious infectious disease outbreaks. I came into the world just after the polio vaccine became available. We heard stories from our parents' generation about polio, and there was a man at my school who was crippled in one arm from its effects. But growing up in the 1960s and 70s we somehow escaped those experiences. It was a luxury.

[liv]

Viruses aren't really independent organisms, they're mechanisms for delivering genetic material into hosts, such as a human. They can't easily be killed because they're not exactly alive in the first place. They also can't replicate (make more viruses) unless they're inside a host cell.

So with bacteria, you have living organisms, though tiny ones. They do all the stuff organisms do, like use energy to grow and divide. Many of them happily do so out in the world, not only inside the body of a person they've infected. But once they do get into your body, you can kill them with antibiotics without (significantly) harming the human host. You can stop them from making vital components of their cells that humans don't have, and then they die, and then you're not infected any more.

With viruses, if they're outside on a surface they will mostly fall apart by themselves after a few days anyway, but you can destroy them even quicker than that with, like, concentrated alcohol or bleach or in the case of Coronaviruses, detergent. But if the virus is inside you, you really don't want to drink concentrated alcohol, bleach or detergent because that would destroy your cells which are made of similar kinds of chemicals. So almost the only way to get rid of them is for your body to produce antibodies which selectively kill only virus infected cells, not healthy cells. You can encourage antibody production by vaccination (but we don't have a vaccine for Covid yet). Or possibly by infusing people with blood from others who have already had the virus and produced an antibody response. But you can't usually take medicine to kill them, because the viruses are basically part of your cells.

(There is an exception, which is antiretroviral therapies as used in AIDS treatment. Those block an enzyme which viruses have and humans mostly don't.)

So, bacteria become resistant because they mutate to be no longer susceptible to antibiotics. They might make a new enzyme which cuts up the antibiotic, or they might make a new enzyme which isn't blocked, or adapt a different enzyme to do the same job even if the normal enzyme is blocked. Some even make a pump that throws all the drug out of the cell before it can kill them, which is very ingenious and you very often get multi-drug resistance that way.

Viruses on the other hand become resistant because they mutate so that antibodies can no longer recognize them. You weren't trying to disrupt their vital functions in the first place because they don't really have any vital functions.

Do I need to unpack any of that or explain it at a different level of detail?

[asher553]

Ahhh, very interesting! The last 2 paragraphs clarify it perfectly for me. Thank you.

IIRC viruses are also vulnerable to heat, which is why your body's strategy is to raise its temperature (run a fever) into a range that your body can tolerate (albeit not happily) but the virus cannot. Am I remembering right?

[warriorsavant]

Congrats.

[ajollypyruvate]

Neat!

[ayebydan]

Congratulations!