Elusive nanobacteria may be linked to kidney stones, other health problems

• Olavi Kajander didn't mean to discover the mysterious particles that have been called the most primitive organisms on Earth and that could be responsible for a series of painful and sometimes fatal illnesses.
• He was simply trying to find out why certain cultures of mammalian cells in his lab would die no matter how carefully he prepared them.
• Believing them to be a possible new form of life, Kajander named the particles "nanobacteria," published a paper outlining his findings and spurred one of the biggest controversies in modern microbiology.
• To this day, critics argue that a particle just 20 to 200 nanometers in diameter can't possibly harbor the components necessary to sustain life.
• The particles are also incredibly resistant to heat and other methods that would normally kill bacteria, which makes some scientists wonder if they might be an unusual form of crystal rather than organisms.
• The debate would have ended there, except for a steadily increasing number of studies linking nanobacteria to serious health problems, including kidney stones, aneurysms and ovarian cancer.
• Another breakthrough came in 2003 when a team from the University of Vienna Medical Center discovered nanobacteria in the calcified debris found in tissue samples from ovarian cancer patients.
• Sensing a growing need for tools to detect and study nanobacteria, Kajander and Çiftçioglu formed a company called NanoBac in 1998.
• Fortunately for the researchers, a 2004 study by the esteemed Mayo Clinic supported many of their key findings and helped them regain some of their support.
• Kajander and Çiftçioglu were further vindicated this February when patients with chronic pelvic pain -- thought to be linked to urinary stones and prostate calcification -- reported "significant improvement" after using an experimental treatment provided by Nanobac Life Sciences, which now owns NanoBac1.