AntiResist, National Center of Competence in Research, University of Basel

Focus area/active in: One Health | Therapeutics

Company/Organisation type: Academia | Research Institute

About:
Antibiotics are powerful and indispensable drugs to treat life threatening bacterial infections, such as sepsis or pneumonia. Antibiotics also play a central role in many other areas of modern medicine, in particular to protect patients with a weakened immune system during cancer therapies, transplantations or surgical interventions. These achievements are now at risk, with the fraction of bacterial pathogens being resistant to one or multiple antibiotics steadily increasing. Infections with those multidrug resistant pathogens can only be treated with the greatest effort – or not at all. At the same time, current research and development is unable to meet the urgent need for new, effective antibiotics. One reason for this is that antibiotic research to date is limited to investigating bacteria and antibiotic action under artificial laboratory conditions. In patients, however, fundamentally different conditions exist with bacteria likely adopting different growth or survival properties. However, our knowledge about these processes is fragmentary at best. The National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) AntiResist is developing new research approaches to better understand the physiology of important bacterial pathogens in infected human patients and to exploit this information to develop axenic systems and human tissue models that best simulate in vivo conditions. Our research focuses on four important human pathogens that cause major health problems worldwide. The assembly and engineering of novel assay systems to monitor growth of bacteria and their response to antibiotics will guide the development of new types of antimicrobial compounds and will help identify novel and innovative antimicrobial strategies. Towards this goal, the NCCR embarks on strategic project partnerships with industry actively engaged in antimicrobial R&D. The research consortium NCCR AntiResist involves 29 research groups in Switzerland and Israel and is centered at its home institution, the University of Basel.

Website: https://nccr-antiresist.ch/

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