Baton Rouge Business Report / August 1, 2006:

Tiny and deadly
By Steve Clark , Business Report staff

Biotech startup says it has a solution to the growing problem of hospital-acquired infections.

It's a science fiction movie waiting to be filmed: microscopic creatures bent on destroying humanity, overwhelming the urgent efforts of the world's best scientific minds.

Too bad it's not fiction. The alarming truth is even the fanciest, priciest antibiotics are having less and less effect on super-resistant strains of pathogenic bacteria, which kill more than 90,000 Americans a year through hospital-acquired infections. Scientists warned for years over-reliance on antibiotics would create a plague of superbugs. That day has arrived. It's a worldwide problem, and doctors are running out of ammunition.

Donal Day, a microbiologist with the LSU Ag Center's Audubon Sugar Institute believes he's found an answer: a "biocide" able to dispatch even the most antibiotic-resistant microbes, staphylococcus and anthrax included. It was developed by Day and Giovanna DeQuerioz, a graduate student, who accidentally discovered the biocide during an unrelated experiment. The substance has been patented by LSU and licensed to Ox-B, a startup biotech company Day co-founded with attorney-turned-investor Brit Davidson, the firm's president.

"As far as we can tell, there's no way resistance will ever develop to this," Day says. "It's a bit like developing resistance to dynamite."

The nature of microorganisms is on exposure to antibiotics, the least resistant die off, leaving the most resistant to thrive. Most have learned to pass on genetic information, which means when one bug "figures out" how to get around an antibiotic, pretty soon they all develop the same defense. Because microbes are such fast learners, pharmaceutical companies set the prices on new antibiotics very high because those antibiotics are on a short path to obsolescence.

"The day the new antibiotic hits the market, the first things that happens is that bug starts trying to figure out how to get around it," Davidson says.

Ox-B's product is a "cold sterilant," so called because it requires no heat to get the job done. Even boiling isn't even enough for certain heat-resistant microbes. To get rid of the hardiest strains requires boiling under pressure at 121ￚC (almost 250ￚF) for long periods of time.

Failing that, some microbial forms can last forever--literally. Day says microbiologists have retrieved 6,000-year-old live bacterial spores from pharaohs' tombs and grown them. Spores are dormant, sort of like microbial seeds. They're harder to kill than growing cells, and they're just waiting for the right host--your lungs, for instance--to grow into an organism, which is why inhaling anthrax spores is a bad idea.

To truly decontaminate, it's necessary to kill not just the growing cells but the spores, too. Other types of microbes make that task harder. Some, for instance, hide themselves inside slimy cocoons called biofilms to protect themselves.

"They stay dormant in there, and most things can't get at them because they can't get through the slime," Day says. "What we're bringing to the table is a simple solution that not only kills spores rapidly, it also penetrates these films. So it's truly a sterilant, not just a disinfectant."

If the stuff really works the way early testing indicates, it could have made cleaning up the Hart Senate Office Building a lot easier after the 2001 anthrax scare and could give New Orleans a new resource for dealing with its incredible mold problems post-Katrina.

"Anthrax spores can be killed in 10 minutes," Davidson says. "And if you can kill anthrax spores, everything else is pretty easy."

The Louisiana Emerging Technology Center --LSU's incubator for the Baton Rouge 's fledgling biotech industry--has enough faith in the potential of Day's biocide that it's given Ox-B space to develop the product. Plenty of testing remains to be done, though initial tests by the U.S. Department of Defense and the Army Corps of Engineers show promising results. Still, getting it from the lab to market is a long road fraught with obstacles. That's one reason the company is negotiating with contacts in China to build a plant there.

"To build one in the United States , the bureaucratic regulation is unbelievable," Davidson says. "Our license is worldwide. The same problems that exist here exist in China . What we'll end up doing is licensing the technology in a joint venture between us and some Chinese investors. But we will continue to operate from Louisiana ."

Arthur Cooper, LETC's executive director, says Ox-B is exactly the kind of company the state had in mind when it built the incubator. Cooper says without LETC, fledgling life-sciences firms such as Ox-B probably would have to leave the state.

"It would be very difficult for them as they expand and commercialize without a facility like this to really get going," Cooper says.

Day's method of vanquishing the microbial foe turns back the clock in a sense, since it emphasizes extreme hygiene to prevent infection rather than antibiotics to drive it away. Prior to the commercialization of penicillin in the early 1940s, hospitals and doctors scrubbed, boiled and hoped for the best. The expanded use of antibiotics has been enormously beneficial in saving lives and making it possible do much more invasive surgeries. But the party's rapidly coming to a close as hospital-acquired infections spiral out of control. The world needs a better mousetrap--fast.

"You're talking about organisms that double in number anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour," Days says. "How many generations are you going to get in a month? We have essentially run out of weapons."