New innovation project aims to make antibiotics more effective

More and more bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics, increasing the risk that even simple infections may become impossible to treat. According to the WHO, by 2023 one in six infections was already resistant to one or more antibiotics.

Finding new ways to treat bacterial infections is therefore increasingly urgent, and Clare Kirkpatrick, Associate Professor at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, has an idea.

“In my research, I can see that bacteria can be manipulated to become more vulnerable to antibiotics. If we can develop a drug that creates this vulnerability, it could be used as a supplement to boost the effect of the antibiotic.”

More specifically, Clare Kirkpatrick envisages a future in which patients receive the booster alongside their course of antibiotics when they collect it from the pharmacy. It might even come as tablets in the same package as the antibiotics themselves.

However, a great deal of research and testing is needed before that vision can become reality. Turning an idea in the laboratory into a finished drug is a long and costly process.

To support the next stage of the work, the Faculty of Science’s Innovation Fund has awarded Kirkpatrick DKK 800,000.

How do bacteria react when antibiotics are coming in?

Kirkpatrick has no interest in leaving research to set up a spinout company based on her discovery. To her, innovation means something else:

“Innovation to me is not only about developing a product, but also about coming up with ideas that have value. I have more good ideas in me than this one, and that is where my commitment lies. I am highly motivated by discovery and very little by commercialisation. My role in this will be to apply for a patent if that becomes relevant, and then I am happy to leave the further development to others,” she says.

The idea for the project emerged when Kirkpatrick, supported by a Semper Ardens: Accelerate grant from the Carlsberg Foundation, began studying the outer protective layer of bacterial cells, known as the cell envelope, to see how it responds to the stress caused by antibiotics.

Two compounds are now being tested

Bacterial cells are extremely efficient at detecting this stress. This gives them time to try to become resistant, for example by mutating, before the antibiotic reaches them. As a result, the antibiotic does not kill all the bacteria.

“We investigated whether we could slow down this warning system, so the bacteria would not have time to prepare for the antibiotic. In the course of that work, we identified two compounds that could do exactly that,” says Clare Kirkpatrick.

The next step is to test the two compounds more thoroughly in combination with antibiotics to see whether slowing down the bacteria’s warning system can make the antibiotics more effective.

The compounds are currently being tested in Clare Kirkpatrick’s laboratory, where she works with bacteria that occur naturally in the environment. The next step will be to test them on disease-causing bacteria and then investigate whether they can be developed into a treatment that can be patented and ultimately prescribed to patients alongside antibiotics.