Gerry Wright: Keeping antibiotics ahead of infectious diseases

Canada Foundation for Innovation

Ce balado est uniquement disponible en anglais.

Antibiotic resistance is an increasingly serious problem - threatening to alter modern medicine as we know it. It's an area of research that has captured Gerry Wright's attention for over two decades. As the director of the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research at McMaster University, Wright and his team have made some exciting progress in identifying where resistant genes come from and how to beat them.

Transcript:

This podcast is brought to you by the Canada Foundation for Innovation.

Imagine cancer chemotherapy without being able to control infection. Imagine open heart surgery. Organ transplantation. Saving premature babies. All of this stuff is based on our ability to control infection and without antibiotics, all those wonderful things we've come to expect from medicine evaporate.

My name is Gerry Wright, I'm the director of the Michael G. de Groote Institute for Infectious Disease Research at McMaster University. Antibiotic resistance has been called an apocalyptic scenario by a number of public health leaders around the world. It's taking us back to what it was like before 1940 when the major reason people died was because of infection. Now your chances of dying of infection or about three percent whereas in say 1930 it was almost sixty percent so the reason for that is antibiotics and vaccines and all the wonderful things that control infection and we're at risk of losing that.

In our lab we are investigating how to overcome antibiotic resistance so that includes finding out what the enemy is an then see what we can do in terms of being able to discover new drugs or new approaches to killing resistant bacteria. Resistance is spreading like wildfire across the the planet because of modern transportation because of all of these interventions that we're doing in hospitals and as a result we have a really significant problem.

One of the biggest issues that we face is that we're not considering in terms of evolution. We think it's sort of a stochastic event but this is entirely predictable process and it's been going on for millennia. So we really need to rethink how we look at a microbes and think about them in terms of their evolutionary history. And then we'll start to be able to rationalize why antibiotic resistance is such a significant problem and maybe even get ahead of it instead of trying to react to it.

We're very interested in thinking about antibiotic resistance on a global level and not just in pathogenic bacteria, disease causing bacteria but rather where do these resistance genes come from in the first place and what we found for example is that environmental bacteria that don't cause disease are actually large reservoirs of resistance genes. Probably the origins of antibiotic resistance and so these genes move throughout bacterial populations horizontally so from one organism to another they share DNA so bacteria are notoriously promiscuous having sex with each other all the time and as a result they share these these genes and we're trying to understand these mechanisms in order to use that against these organisms to solve this problem.

We reported in, "Nature" a molecule that blocks one of the most important antibiotic resistance elements out there right now and that rescues antibiotic activity. That was a big day in the lab when we were actually able to give a mouse an infection with a lethal dose of of drug resistant organisms, add the antibiotic and add this compound and when this compound, this inhibitor of resistance is added the mice live so that was the big eureka sort of moment that we were really onto something hot...

And so we're actually in the early stages of sort of a real drug discovery process where we're doing things that I never thought we would be able to do because we have this really this really hot molecule. So that's incredibly exciting and time will tell whether or not will actually be a drug that we can use for people but it's the closest I've come in the last twenty five years of dreaming about something like this. It's a pretty exciting feeling to go back and look at where we started and where we are now. It really shows that you can stay in Canada and get things done.

This podcast is brought to you by the Canada Foundation for Innovation.

If you're a researcher looking for funding opportunities click here.

If you're a business looking for research facilities that can help you succeed click here.