CU Boulder researchers create custom antibiotic platform
A new platform designed by University of Colorado Boulder researchers can create bacteria-specific antibiotics in five days, offering a solution to the growing problem of drug-resistant bacteria and opening the door for antiviral treatments for the common cold, the flu and coronavirus.
The FAST platform — which stands for Facile Accelerated Specific Therapeutic — allows scientists to design, synthesize, test and deliver polymers, similar to RNA, that target specific parts of the bacteria.
“It asks, if you want to target this bacteria, what genes should I target?” said Kristen Eller, CU Boulder graduate student and first author of a paper about the FAST platform published in the journal Nature Communications Biology in March.
“What’s going to be the most effective, what’s going to be the most unique thing to target, can it be synthesized, are there any issues with that sequence that would make the molecule not stable?” Eller said.
Eller and the team in Professor Anushree Chatterjee’s lab tested the platform on multidrug-resistant bacteria, including strains of E. coli and salmonella. The study found that the FAST antibiotics significantly inhibited growth 82% of the time.
A combination of factors has made drug-resistant bacteria a growing public health concern, Eller said, as bacteria is evolving faster than scientists are developing new antibiotics to fight them. Developing antibiotics traditionally can take years to complete.
And while the FAST designed antibiotics aren’t in human trials yet, the platform offers the medical community hope of closing the gap created by superbugs developing faster than treatments to fight them.
It also presents an alternative to broad-spectrum antibiotics that can kill good bacteria along with the bad.
“The benefit of this is we can customize it to try not to harm or affect other bacteria and be specific to our interest,” Eller said. “Antibiotic resistance is something we need to be aware of, something that will impact us and is already impacting us. We need new kinds of solutions.”