The search for new antimicrobials - with Rosemary Dorrington

Описание: Full title: The search for new antimicrobials: Leveraging the chemical diversity of marine natural products as chemical leads for antimicrobial development

Synopsis: Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a major threat to global public health. In 2019 ~1,3 million deaths were attributed directly to AMR bacterial infections and without intervention, the mortality rate is predicted to reach 10 million deaths by 2050. There is thus a critical need for novel classes of antibiotics to combat drug resistant bacterial and fungal pathogens. The SA-UK Antimicrobial Drug Discovery (ADD) Hub was launched in 2020 as a collaborative partnership to address the challenge of AMR to develop infrastructure and build capacity to support a multidisciplinary platform for cutting-edge antimicrobial discovery research. Our aim is to exploit the chemical diversity of natural products (NPs) as a source of chemical leads for the development of new classes of antimicrobial drugs.
The focus of this talk will be on the Hub’s marine NPs discovery pipeline developed to derive maximum benefit from limited sample biomass, where employing a multi-omics approaches facilitate rapid dereplication of bioactive extracts, enabling the early prioritisation of active NPs for functional characterisation and progression to lead optimization.

Bio: Rosemary Dorrington (PhD, Microbiology UCT) is the Professor of Microbiology in the Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology and Bioinformatics at Rhodes University, Makhanda South Africa and is the Principal Investigator of the SA/UK Antimicrobial Drug Discovery Hub. She leads a multi-disciplinary Marine Natural Products research group that is active across the broad field of marine biodiscovery, using multi-omics approaches to explore the potential of marine natural products as lead compounds for drug development.