558931 event 1470229180 1492118114 Back to the Future: Making Old Antibiotics Work Again

]]> In my job talk a year ago I asked ‘can we make evolution-proof drugs?’, and offered theory and experimental evidence that this is possible. I showed that by targeting bacterial collective traits (eg. extracellular digestion) we can make drugs that select against resistance mutations. In this talk I will pick up on the problem I spelt out at the end of my job talk - our candidate ‘evolution proof’ treatments are sadly not the most effective drugs - and outline solutions that aim to restore and maintain the efficacy of our most potent drugs, our fading arsenal of old antibiotics. I will outline three overlapping strategies that we are currently developing - defusing resistance with adjuvants, killing resistant cells with phages and conditioning treatment choices on rapid and specific resistance diagnoses. In principle, these strategies offer a route to effective and evolutionarily robust treatments. 

]]> If you have questions about logistics or would like to set up an appointment with the speaker, please contact the School of Biology's administrative office at bio-admin@biology.gatech.edu.

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