Together with colleague Anushree Chattetrjee, who works on developing new therapies for antibiotic treatment, Nagpal wondered if the light-responsive dots could be used to fight superbugs. The result was a new form of quantum dots that can selectively target bacteria.

“What it could mean is that these quantum dots can be present everywhere, and when developed completely as a therapy, they can be activated by light to clear infections in animals or humans without killing the host mammalian cells,” Nagpal says. When activated, the dots produce just enough a substance that is toxic to bacterial cells, but harmless to the host’s own cells.

When testing the dots in cell cultures, the dots had no effect on healthy human cells. And light exposure to activate them could be as little as a room light or the sun (or a more directed LED for deeper infections).

They could theoretically be so effective, that they would only require a one million-times smaller dose than traditional drugs.

Quantum dots are easily and cheaply manufactured so scaling them up to treat infections on a worldwide scale would cost just a few cents (or less) per dose.

“A minuscule amount of drug with some light can treat some of the worst superbug infections we tested in clinical strains acquired from a Colorado hospital,” Nagpal says. “Of course, more work and extensive studies in preclinical and clinical trials need to be done before we can administer these quantum dots to patients. However, this initial study shows a lot of promising features.”

INFECTION-KILLING POLYMERS

Antibiotics may not be the only answer to fighting superbugs. Researchers at the University of Melbourne have discovered a totally unconventional method of killing deadly bacteria.

Turns out a star-shaped polymer (a chain of molecules) that they engineered 15 years ago to add viscosity to automotive paints and engine oils has some interesting abilities when it’s re-purposed for biological uses. While researching the polymer’s ability to deliver drugs to treat cancer, the scientists realised that a version of the star called Snapp (Structurally Nanoengineered Antimicrobial Peptide Polymers) had become toxic to bacteria.

Among other ways of killing the bugs, it has the ability to rip apart their cell walls by becoming absorbed into the cell’s membrane and pulling out its lipid layer.

If funding comes through, the researchers think they could be testing this method in humans within five years. “Our star synthesis is an engineering process and can be easily scaled up. It is also not very expensive. The regulatory approval will likely be the slowest step,” says chemical engineer Greg Qiao, whose lab at the Melbourne School of Engineering is responsible for the work.

GETTING OUT OF SILOES

One of the biggest problems in medicine, and science in general, is that researchers don’t always work directly with doctors to solve health problems. That means they tend to miss out on key data that can only be gleaned by working directly with patients.

At the Antibiotic Resistance Center at Emory University in Georgia, clinicians and research scientists are working together to better understand how to diagnose and treat resistance. “I’m not a doctor. I need to know from the clinicians a lot of what they’re seeing on the front lines to help guide our research to be as relevant as possible,” says David Weiss, director of the center.

One of the biggest results of this partnership so far has been the development of a new diagnostic test to help doctors discover what bacterium is responsible for resistance inside a patient that’s not responding to antibiotics. Based on the success of this model, Weiss says, other clinical institutions are starting to open their own versions of the centre that brings researchers and doctors together.

BRIDGING ACADEMIA AND INDUSTRY

The world desperately needs new antibiotics, but drug companies haven’t developed a new one in 30 years. That’s because drug development is extremely expensive and there’s little profit in the final product.

To address this, Pew Charitable Trusts, a public policy non-profit in Philadelphia, has developed the Shared Platform for Antibiotic Research and Knowledge (Spark). It’s a cloud-based, virtual library of antibiotic research data and analytics that scientists can use to work together on building new discoveries. “Similar data-sharing resources have successfully catalysed drug discovery in other research areas such as cancer, neglected tropical diseases, and tuberculosis,” says Kathy Talkington, director of the antibiotic resistance programme at Pew Charitable Trusts. “We hope that Spark will do the same for antibiotic-resistant bacteria. We expect it to be publicly available, and open for use by researchers from around the world, within the next year.”

The hope is that allowing scientists to work across different disciplines, develop new methodologies for antibiotic discovery, and work within academia and the industry could be the key to ending the years-long drought in new antibiotic development.

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