Attempts to combat growing antibiotic resistance among potentially deadly bacteria have ranged from the basics, such as improving stewardship practices in healthcare settings and agriculture, to the more obscure, like searching for new antibiotic candidates among plants. But a team from Stanford University in California is working to solve the problem by focusing on a different avenue — genetically altered proteins.
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The group of three students received $10,000 in funding to develop their idea, according to an NPR report. Although the researchers, who called themselves Team Lyseia, can't talk about the specifics of their method, they said the primary mechanism relates to bacteria being reliant on the antibiotic protein to live. Should they begin to show signs of resistance to antibiotics, the bacteria will in turn resist the protein, which they rely on, and they will die off.
"The way that our proteins operate, that if the bacteria evolve resistance to them, actually the bacteria can no longer live anymore," Zach Rosenthal, a senior student at Stanford and a member of Team Lyseia, told NPR. "We target something that's essential to bacterial survival."
The researchers report the preliminary results of their work are promising, andthey believe their method has the potential to kill multi-drug resistant bacteria responsible for thousands of deaths worldwide each year.