Development of a platform for novel antibiotics

Only 100 years ago, bacterial infection was one of the most dangerous and prevalent of problems in human health and was a major cause of human fatalities.
Antibiotics have changed this picture completely, and most bacterial infections are easily treated by using the correct antibiotic.
However, the overuse of antibiotics has led to the appearance of highly resistant strains, that cannot be treated with normal antibiotics.
This is especially true of hospitals, where patients are in danger of being infected with resistant pathogens.
The development of totally new antibiotics is very slow, very expensive and has not been in the forefront of development by pharmaceutical companies.
We have used a novel form of bioinformatics to identify short sequences in pathogenic bacterial proteins that appear much less than expected.

We hypothesized that they are missing as they are harmful to the cells and thus might be used as a new type of antibiotics. We are now in the process of proving that this is indeed the case, using short peptides against bacteria such as E. coli and Salmonella (in collaboration with Prof. Sima Yaron from the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering of the Technion). We believe that these peptides will serve a larger platform of antibiotics that will be able to counteract resistance appearance in the treated bacteria.