Background

Solving the antibiotic resistance crisis requires the discovery of new antimicrobial drugs and the preservation of existing ones. With no new antibiotics on the horizon, blocking resistance with antibiotic adjuvants have emerged as a viable strategy. Antibiotics are co-formulated with an inhibitor of resistance, blocking the resistance element and freeing the antibiotic to target the bacterium. A major difficulty in identifying new antibiotics is the frequent rediscovery of known compounds, necessitating laborious “dereplication” to identify novel chemical entities.

Technology Overview

The antibiotic resistance platform (ARP) developed by researchers at McMaster can be used for both the identification of antibiotic adjuvants and for antibiotic dereplication. The ARP is a cell-based library of Escherichia coli expressing mechanistically distinct individual resistance elements