CPOS Seminar: A Materials-Inspired Antibiotic Platform to Combat the Silent Pandemic of Antimicrobial Resistance
Speaker: Alex Moreland, PhD - Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California Santa Barbara
Abstract: The scourge of COVID-19 delivered a painful reminder to humanity about a time before effective infection treatment, prevention, and control. However, a fundamental threat to global health has been looming since long before the coronavirus pandemic began. Each year, 1.3M people die as a direct result of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and this number is predicted to swell to 10M by 2050, making AMR more deadly than cancer. Antibiotic resistant bacteria can persist indefinitely in the environment, in the household, in healthcare centers, and even within our own microbiome. With few or no effective antibiotics, mortality rates are high, in certain cases approaching 100%. The risk of contracting an untreatable infection is poised to undermine modern healthcare as elective surgeries will be forgone, organ transplants will be impossible, and immuno-suppressive therapies will leave patients vulnerable. This impending disaster is often termed the “post-antibiotic era” in which infectious disease will again be the greatest killer as it was before the advent of antibiotics. The WHO has listed AMR as a top global health threat on par with climate change. Despite the general acknowledgement of the threat, the antibiotic pipeline is empty, public awareness and concern is minimal, and funding is woefully inadequate.
In this presentation I will make the case for AMR as the greatest scientific and humanitarian challenge of our time. Then I will present a potential solution that was developed in our lab – a novel class of antibiotics that evade resistance. This antibiotic platform was derived from compounds originally designed for use in bioelectronic technologies. I will discuss how we came to discover their antimicrobial activity and how we have systematically elucidated structure-activity relationships. Finally, I will explain what is known about their mechanism of action and highlight their differentiating properties that could turn the tide against AMR.
