Back to the future: systems approaches against antimicrobial resistance

Despite decades of antibiotic use, we lack a mechanistic and systematic understanding of how antibiotics affect bacteria upon exposure to other drugs and the host. This knowledge gap limits our efforts to detect, treat and predict antimicrobial resistance. By systematically probing drug-drug and drug-gene interactions, we revisited foundational knowledge in antibiotic research and proposed new antibacterial strategies against multidrug-resistant bacteria. We mapped drug-drug interactions at the level of growth inhibition and resistance, uncovering novel synergies against multidrug-resistant bacteria and cross-resistance relationships that can be used to rationally design sequential antibacterial treatments. Integrating drug-drug and drug-gene/protein interactions, we unraveled new antibacterial effects of old antibiotics and of non-antibiotic drugs, challenging and expanding our knowledge of antibiotic action across several bacterial species.
Host: Andreas Peschel
Lecture hall 3M07, GUZ