Abstract

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the greatest current threats to human health. The recent report commissioned by the UK Government, concluding that AMR infections will cause more deaths than cancer by 2050 if not addressed urgently. Given the escalating antimicrobial resistance crisis, it is imperative to identify new therapeutic strategies. To date the ßlactamase inhibitors are the only type of antibiotic helper drugs used in clinical practice. These drugs reverse antibiotic resistance by inhibiting the bacterial enzyme responsible for degradation of the ßlactam antibiotics. Emergence of the New Delhi metallo beta lactamase 1 (NDM-1) as a broad-spectrum carbapenemase, acquired and expressed through horizontal gene transfer among “superbugs”, has further exacerbate current crisis. Our discovery opens new perspectives on the possibility to defeat resistant superbugs by combining current antibiotics with 'helper' drugs that reverse antibiotic resistance.

In this presentation, we describe our approaches how existing antibiotics can be made to reuse them without the need for discovering expensive new and novel antibiotics, which in turn expected to developing resistance in due course.