Efficient production of first in class antimicrobial therapeutics from an integrated synthetic biology approach.

Antibiotic resistant bacteria kill over 25,000 people a year in Europe and threaten a return to a time when minor infections can be fatal and routine surgery poses high risks. With development pipelines empty, there is a critical need for novel therapies to kill antibiotic resistant bacteria and serve as scaffolds for derivatisation, diversification and enhancement of efficacy, which proved successful with drugs like penicillin. This project will develop an exciting new class of antimicrobial biologics that rapidly kill bacteria, at very low doses and have great potential to prevent or treat bacterial infections including those caused by resistant bacteria. However, the development of the primary targets is hampered by their very low production in the native host and synthetic production would be prohibitively expensive. This project aims to develop efficient, adaptable and scalable microbial production systems for this novel compound class, enabling their development into a new platform of effective antibiotics.