Crowdsourcing to Combat Superbugs
The increase in the prevalence of antibiotic resistance is rarely out of the news. In a current report in The Guardian newspaper, the director of Antibiotic Research UK says that it is “almost too late” to stop a global superbug crisis.
A huge amount of resources is being poured into combating antibiotic resistance, including crowdsourcing initiatives.
To help give research endeavors a boost, scientists from the Community for Open Antimicrobial Drug Discovery (CO-ADD) at the University of Queensland’s Institute for Molecular Biology are crowdsourcing compounds from their colleagues.
They have issued an open invitation to scientists all over the world to submit their compounds for free scanning against potential life-threatening strains of bacteria and fungi such as MRSA.
In so doing, they are creating the world’s first open-access compound bank. It will be a place where researchers can freely access information about the structure and activity of these compounds to help them learn more about how antibiotics work and the types of compounds that could become powerful and effective antibiotics.
The bottom line is that new antibiotics are needed, and sooner rather than later.
The director of the CO-ADD, Professor Matthew Cooper, highlighted the urgency of this need. “We are heading towards a return to the pre-antibiotic era, when even simple infections caused death.”
By June 2016, University of Queensland scientists will have screened more than 50,000 chemical compounds at no cost to the providers.
Could the next generation of antibiotics already be sitting in laboratories?
Can crowdsourcing help to find them?
The more compounds that are screened the higher the probability that new molecular weapons will be found.
For an introduction to this global quest to defeat superbugs, watch the short video below.
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Terminal Plasmids...
Posted by Alistair Wilson on September 19, 2016
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