McMaster University

Purpose

Antibiotic resistance (AMR) is among the most pressing health care concerns of the 21st Century. The indiscriminate use of antibiotics over the past 70 years has resulted in the selection of bacteria that are resistant to all of the current antibiotic drugs. Of particular concern are Gram negative bacteria such as Acinetobacter baumannii that often are causes of outbreaks in health care settings. Strategies that target antibiotics to specific bacterial species such as A. baumannii should decrease the evolutionary pressure towards resistance selection. The research team has a collection of ~15,000 of environmental bacteria and fungi that produce many bioactive natural products including antibiotics. The research team will screen this collection for compounds with antibiotic activity towards A. baumannii and link these to targeted antibodies developed at NRC to generate antibiotic-antibody conjugates that can serve as next generation highly specific antimicrobial agents, one of the key objective of the Ideation Small Team AMR project.