IAA - New antibiotics for the treatment of drug-resistant bacterial infections

EPSRC funded research in the Bull group previously identified a completely new class of vinyl-isocyanide antimicrobial that displays outstanding activity against a range of clinically relevant pathogenic drug-resistant Gram-positive bacteria (e.g. Staphylococcus aureus) that are responsible for 2.8 million infections and 35,000 deaths in the EU annually alone. Screening studies have revealed that these vinyl-isocyanides also exhibit antimicrobial activity against permeabilized Gram-negative bacteria (e.g. Escherichia coli) and pathogenic fungi (e.g. Candida albicans), for which there is currently an urgent unmet need for new clinical treatments. This round of EPSRC IAA funding was used to carry out a 14C-antibiotic labelling study to identify the biological target of these antimicrobials in multiple bacterial targets in collaboration with Dr Luke Alderwick at the University of Birmingham. Follow on funding was then used to further investigate the synthesis and activity of vinyl isocyanide compounds using newly developed antimicrobial/anti-inflammatory (complement pathway inhibition) assays with Dr Maisem Laabei at the University of Bath.