Periodic Reporting for period 4 - NO-ESKAPE (Addressing Antibiotic Resistance: New Strategies for Overcoming the ESKAPE Pathogens)
Reporting period: 2021-07-01 to 2023-05-31
Without effective antibiotics, many routine medical procedures carry a high risk and simple bacterial infections can become deadly. As more and more bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, doctors have fewer and fewer options for treating infections. This project outlines new chemistry-based strategies for developing novel antibiotics to address the threat of antibiotic resistance.
The research performed in the NO-ESKAPE project has led to important advances in the development of new antibiotics that overcome clinically relevant resistance mechanisms. The findings of the project have been reported in a number of peer-review publications and at various scientific conferences. Also of note, three patents have been filed as a result of the discoveries made in the project. This in turn has laid the foundation for the pre-clinical development of an exciting new class of antibiotics that are particularly effective at treating infections due to methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE), two of the most problematic “superbugs” encountered in hospital settings.
The new antibiotics developed in the NO-ESAKPE project have been evaluated using a number of in vitro and in vivo assays and found to outperform clinically used antibiotics that are considered to be state of the art (i.e. vancomycin and daptomycin). Of key importance is the finding that the new antibiotics developed in the NO-ESKAPE project are very effective at targeting MRSA in animal models of infection. These new antibiotics are much more potent than currently used antibacterial drugs meaning a significantly lower does is required to cure infection. Given the dangerous side-effects associated with many clinically used antibiotics, the new antibiotics discovered in the NO-ESAKPE project may provide a safer means for treating patients with serious bacterial infections.