Antibiotics are life-saving medicines, but they can cause a lot of collateral damage in the body---side effects range from nausea to vaginal yeast infections. Plus, once they're flushed from the body they can wreak all kinds of havoc by accumulating in the environment and building up antibiotic resistance. However a new kind of antibiotic might avoid such side effects by turning on, with the flip of a light, only when and where they're needed. As the BBC describes,
The basic concept is to equip drug molecules with chemical components that change shape in response to heat or light... The way a drug binds to its target usually depends on it having a shape that fits rather precisely into a “slot” on the target enzyme. So if a drug changes shape, it might no longer work.
The idea is to administer the drugs but only turn them on in the relevant ...
