Professor Niren Murthy, in partnership with School of Public Health Professor Lee Riley, has be awarded a three-year R33 grant from the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The project, “Maltose targeted antibiotics”, focuses on developing new treatments for drug-resistant gram negative bacteria (GNB).
Developing antibiotics against GNB has been challenging because of their low membrane permeability, which prevents antibiotics from reaching therapeutic concentrations the bacterium. Murthy and Riley are pursuing a new strategy for enhancing the transport of antibiotics into GNB, via conjugation to thiomaltose. This will allow the drugs to enter bacteria through the pathways designed for maltodextrin and other oligosaccharides, which are the preferred food source for bacteria.