Is Kalocin real?

Question

In Michael Chrichton's novel on Nanotechnology, Prey, the Antibiotic/Antiviral Kalocin is mentioned. At first I assumed it was fake, but in the back of the book I'm pretty sure it actually mentions the journal Nature as a reference on it!! Kalocin is supposedly able to kill almost all known pathogenic organisms, but completely and irreversibly eradicates the patient's immune system as a side-effect. Apparently discovered by Jensen pharmaceuticals (a REAL company) in 1965, and no-one uses (and therefore knows) about it because it's side-effect, a non-existent immune system, killed all the people in the clinical trials. Is it actually real? TY!

Answer 1

Kalocin is entirely fictional.

There is no known substance that would be preferentially toxic to unicellular organisms. When we give an antibiotic or antiviral medication, we're trying to find a target that's specific to that organism. The characteristic of being "single-celled" is not a specific enough target. This is because the individual cells in higher, multicellular organisms (like humans) are structurally and functionally quite similar on the cellular level.

Edit for additional info:

Interesting thought, except that all cells in your body communicate with each other either directly or indirectly. In fact, the degree to which they communicate with each other far exceeds signals you might observe within a colony of bacteria. Cellular signaling networks are huge drug targets for *our* internal diseases, but they don't make very good targets for antibiotics.

Cancer is just our cells growing out of control, unsuppressed by the tissue they came from. In fact, many cancers have a much higher sensitivity to certain signals (growth factors) and we often use drugs that block signaling in order to curb tumor growth.

Unicellular organisms perform a lot of the same metabolic and growth processes that individual cells from multicellular organisms do.The difference is that cells from multicellular organisms communicate and work together, while unicellular organisms are out for themselves. My point was that we work very hard to identify those differences (between our cells and infecting cells) in order to find/design drugs that target those differences. For example:

1. Bacteria have cells walls and cell membranes. Human cells don't have cell walls (but we do have membranes).  Penicillin antibiotics s***w up cell wall formation, so they're "selective" for bacteria.

2. Even though humans and bacteria both use ribosomes to make proteins from mRNA transcripts, tetracycline antibiotics bind preferentially to the bacterial form.

There is no drug out there that can tell the difference between a single unicellular organism and a single cell of a multicellular organism. Yes, our immune system knows the difference, but only because bacteria, viruses, fungi, etc. have different proteins and sugars on the surface of their cells, compared to ours. A single chemical, like a drug, simply isn't "smart" enough to know the difference.  That's why it take a huge coordinated cellular response (immune response) to make that identification - and deal with it.

Answer 2

no it is not real