Resistance to antibiotics is a concern with many bacterial diseases, but few more than one caused by Bacillus anthracis, the anthrax bacterium. It can infect the skin, gut—or much worse, the lungs. “Inhalation anthrax” kills three-quarters of its victims even if they get the right antibiotics.

Enter Ravi Kane, an associate professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York. He reckons he has a strategy and his research team has come up with a device for damage control: an inhibitor that doesn’t gum up the workings of the bacterium, but instead closes off the human receptors that the anthrax toxin uses to spread disease.

This approach, described in the research journal PNAS, has proven effective at stopping cells in petri dishes and rats dying from exposure to anthrax. It proved 50,000 times more potent than other antibiotics in cell culture. And in the rat experiment, six out of six animals injected with it survived—with apparently no side effects—while all untreated rats, and others treated with other inhibitors, died.

Mr. Kane believes new drugs targeting human receptors rather than pathogens, as now, could combat fast-mutating viruses such as HIV and flu. A virus such as HIV can become drastically resistant to drugs with only a subtle alteration in its proteins, he explains.

But the change tends not to interfere with the virus’ ability to bind and infect new cells, and this suggests drug designers might more usefully focus on receptors. “A host protein is not mutating like proteins on the pathogen—so it’s a stationary target versus a moving one,” Mr. Kane says.

The inhibitor still has a long way to go before it can be prescribed to humans. But it has the potential to be used on people with inhalation anthrax—by itself or in combination with other antibiotics. Generally speaking, Mr. Kane says, drugs targeting human receptors could be taken to prevent infection, and treat it, for that matter.

There has been other activity on the anthrax front. In August, Brisbane, California-based VaxGen published data showing an immune response in volunteers testing its early-stage, experimental anthrax vaccine called rPA102. The company previously won an $877.5-million contract with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to provide 75 million doses of anthrax vaccine for civilian biodefense.

Vaccines basically teach the immune system to look for the problem, rather than close off the route deadly bateria use. But until either vaccines or inhibitors are more finely-tuned, best not inhale your mail.

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