Antibiotic Resistance & Stretegies

Views:1160       Publish Time: 2017-11-09

Antibiotic resistance (AR) refers to the ability of bacteria to resist the treatment of drugs, which is causing more and more global threat nowadays. The resistant pathogenic strains will have to be dealt with either higher dose of antibiotics or alternative strategies, even worse, probably no drugs could be applied when infected by the "super bugs". 

In general, there are four fundamental mechanisms for the arising of AR, including drug inactivation/modification, alteration of target or binding site, mutation of metabolic pathways and reduced accumulation of drugs. The dissemination could be interpreted as environmental selection, gene transfer or point gene mutations. However, the current understanding is not sufficient enough to fight against the AR pathogens, particular after the emergence and prevalence of multi-drug-resistant strains (MDR) and loss of effectiveness of first-line antibiotics. 

Our research interests include expanding biological understanding of AR and MDR mechanisms, screening new antibiotics based on our existing automatic foundry or microfluidics, developing new therapeutic drugs (e.g. phage therapy) and new treating strategies (e.g. combination of multiple effective antibiotics).