Centre for New Antibacterial Strategies (CANS) seminar

There is a general consensus that antimicrobial resistant infections are a formidable threat to modern medicine. With a drying antibiotic pipeline, urgent actions are needed to spur research and develop new antibiotics. Because new treatments alone are not sufficient to combat superbugs, it is imperative to safeguard our current last-line antibiotics and to offer innovative strategies that speed up the clinical translation of newer agents. Unfortunately, many antimicrobials suffer poor in vivo stability, low permeability across biological barriers and high systemic toxicities. Against this backdrop, drug delivery nanocarriers fabricated from natural polymers hold immense promise to easily address these challenges. To emulate nature’s precise spatial co-location of bioactive molecules, scientists are adapting the elegance of rational design and self-assembly to create addressable, nanoscale biologically inspired containers for drug delivery. Within this context, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) based nanocarriers are an attractive platform for antimicrobials given their high polyanionic character, in vivo biodegradability and biocompatibility. In this seminar we will discuss the burgeoning field of DNA nanotechnology and how it can be exploited for the delivery of antimicrobial cargos and/or target resistant pathogens. Previous projects that exploit this approach for cutaneous and ophthalmic bacterial infections and their current exploration in our group will be presented.