Fighting the Superbugs: An Approach to Development of New Antibiotics

Professor Nick Dixon
Centre for Medical Bioscience (CMB)

Wednesday 6th May  |  BLDG 20.2 (12:30-1:30pm)

> Hear and see Nick's presentation

Many of us, or a close friend or relative, has had a potentially life-threatening encounter with infectious bacteria that have developed resistance to one or more commonly used antibacterial drugs. While the most familiar of these is MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), there are many other bacteria that pose very serious health threats especially to immunocompromised patients and those living in developing nations.

Discovery of a range of new antibiotics and their judicious use is the only practical way to fight these infections to save lives. Unfortunately, the pharmaceutical industry has been slow to respond to the challenge. One of several current approaches is to design new chemical compounds that specifically interfere with an essential process common to all bacteria, like DNA replication. A prerequisite to knowledge-based design is comprehensive understanding of how these essential processes work at the molecular level, requiring intensive research in many laboratories over many years.

DNA replication, the copying of DNA in cells that are about to divide, presents several good molecular targets for development of new drugs against which resistance should be slow or impossible to develop. Bacterial DNA replication is accomplished by the replisome, a molecular machine comprising about 30 distinct proteins that can be isolated separately and reassembled into a functioning machine in the laboratory. After more than 30 years of research, we now understand how replisomal DNA synthesis occurs through a series of exquisitely orchestrated steps, where each component has distinct functions at each stage. At long last, this places us in an excellent position to exploit this knowledge to design new drugs.