Antibiotics to combat antimicrobial resistance

Alfonso Jaramillo

Instituto de Biología Integrativa de Sistemas (I2SysBio-CSIC), Spain

It is feared that antimicrobial resistance will cause more deaths than cancer by 2050. This is a serious global health problem that requires new strategies to systematically produce antimicrobial molecules against any bacteria.

Currently, most approaches to developing new antibiotics are based on screening potential natural molecules that already have antibiotic capacity or creating new molecules by randomly modifying existing ones and testing their potential antibiotic capacity against pathogens through a trial-and-error approach. But this strategy is slow, takes many years and enormous effort, and is not always successful. Moreover, in the meantime bacteria can combat this by developing new resistance due to their evolutionary capacity. Indeed, they have been shown to do this within hours in controlled environments.

The researchers will use evolution to create protein-based antimicrobial molecules. To enable this, they will develop a technology capable of accelerating evolution one million-fold compared to natural systems, making it possible to foresee mutations that could make bacteria resistant so as to adapt antimicrobial molecules to them. Moreover, the antibacterials they develop will not be able to evolve on their own and will be harmless to beneficial bacteria, resolving one of the undesirable effects of current antibiotics.

Accelerated evolution of high-weight protein complexes for precision antimicrobials

€482,730