Biofilms and Disease: Why should I care?

Karen Vaughan, L.Ac., Registered Herbalist (AHG) posted this in News Posts, Uncategorized, western medicine on September 15th, 2009

Anyone who has felt plaque on their teeth, seen films at the edge of a pond, found thick slimy glop when cleaning out a sink or fountain or suffered a respiratory infection has come into contact with biofilms. When certain bacteria are in wet environments, they attach and send out signals to attract other bacteria called “quorum sensing” molecules. When the other bacteria start congregating, they start differentiating into bacteria that attach, that transport nutrients, that digest, that form protective films or crusts, adjust resistance and become far more formidable than any bacterium alone. The biofilms are made of the bacteria, the water and the proteins, sugars and DNA that the bacteria exude. For instance, when you get a respiratory virus, your bronchi are moist sites for bacterial complications. When a bacteria lands, it calls others and makes a biofilm that blocks oxygen intake, causing you to cough. The biofilm protects the most interior bacteria. When you take antibiotics, the surface bacteria adapt by taking in samples of the antibiotics, “tasting” them with tiny efflux pumps and figuring out how to adapt. They communicate this information to other bacteria in the biofilm. This is how bacteria get resistant to the antibiotics. They are even able to recombine with dead bacteria from other diseases to learn chemically how to protect themselves. This is why our antibiotics have become less effective and why we have resistant “superbacteria”.

There are herbs that being weaker than antibiotics, sneak in under the radar of the bacteria and disable their efflux pumps, which is why you ought to take those herbs together with antibiotics. This is a direct attack on bacterial resistance. But new biosignal technology based on plant compounds called furanones disrupts the biofilm in different ways.

Biosignal technology prevents or disrupts resistant biofilms without killing bacteria. Instead it blocks the quorum sensing molecules that allow the bacteria to congregate and other signaling molecules that affect virulence and resistance. This approach to bacterial control is aimed at delivering treatment while sidestepping bacterial resistance.

There is a red seaweed, Delisea pulchra, that is not colonized by bacterial films, unlike most. This is used by the Australian firm Biosignals which has synthesized the chemicals and uses them for medical equipment and contact lenses. The scientists found that the seaweed was rarely covered in bacterial biofilm colonies. They established that the seaweed uses natural chemicals, furanones, to keep it free of biofilms. The furanones jam cell-to-cell signaling systems that are pivotal to the ability of bacteria to form and maintain biofilms.

Preventing bacterial communication suggests that furanones may be effective against a wide range of bacteria. In vitro studies have found that many furanones are useful against cholera, penumonia, cystic fibrosis-related infections, food poisoning, golden staph infections and tuberculosis. Some of these bacteria have become resistant to current antibiotics. Now, in vitro studies bathe the bacteria in a solution with the furanones, which is not the way your body works, so there isn’t direct oral administration evidence yet. More research needs to be done.

Furanones are found in a variety of herbs. Andrographis, for instance, and members of the parsley family. There may be other seaweeds that have not been identified. A colleague who is studying biofilms suggested putting vanillin into my fountain to stop the biofilm formation and it has probably slowed it down (as well as making the waiting room smell like vanilla.)

The class of furanones is large enough however that we should first look at the traditional uses of the plants, rather than looking first for constituents in the plants. The traditional use has thousands of years of trial and error, while new drugs are unproven in the long term.

Not all biofilms are bad. The probiotic bacteria that forms a living wallpaper along your gut, protecting you from disease, heavy metals and allergens, is one you want. The appendix stores a biofilm of probiotic bacteria in its cul de sac, to protect the body from potential pathogens in the GI tract that might wipe them out. It allows us to be re-colonized by our symbionts. We have good bacteria, most likely in thin films all over out bodies.

We evolved as clusters of bacteria, which differentiated into a superstructure housing lots of partially incorporated microorganisms like mitochondria and independent microorganisms like the lactobacilli in our gut. We do need to be sure that strategies we use in preventing disease will not disrupt our own biological processes.