Towards new antibacterial drugs to treat infections caused by multidrug-resistant bacteria: identification and characterization of novel natural product antibiotics
The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared antimicrobial drug resistance one of the greatest problems currently facing human health, and the situation is especially grave in the case of infections caused by bacterial pathogens. Compounding the issue, in the last 40 years only two structurally-novel antibacterial classes have been successfully developed for treating life-threatening bacterial infections.
The majority of our existing antibacterial armamentarium are microbial products; despite this, most antibacterial drug discovery programmes have abandoned the search for novel natural product antibiotics, favoring instead rational synthetic chemistry approaches which have yet to bear fruit.
The proposed studentship intends to utilize several innovative approaches to find and characterize novel antibiotic classes produced by micro-organisms, with a view to ultimately developing drugs active against multi-drug resistant bacterial pathogens such as Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa.
Hawkey, P. M. (2008). The growing burden of antimicrobial resistance. Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, 62 (Supplement 1), i1-i9. doi: 10.1093/jac/dkn241. Talbot, G. H., Bradley, J., Edwards Jr., J. E., Gilbert, D., Scheld, M., Bartlett, J. G., et al. (2006). Bad bugs need drugs: an update on the development pipeline from the Antimicrobial Availability Task Force of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. Clin Infect Dis., 42 (5), 657-68.
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