The postdocs subjected Balamuthia to the 2,177 drugs known to have done no harm to humans. Each day, they’d remove the amoeba from its place on the rack in the world’s most dangerous refrigerator and see if any of the drugs might kill it. “It’s scary to work with,” one of the postdocs confessed, but then suddenly it wasn’t. Because one of the approved drugs indeed killed the amoeba. Nitroxoline, it was called. Joe and his postdocs wrote up their findings and published the result in mBio, a microbiology journal, in October 2018.
