Revolutionising the fight against antibiotic resistance
Belgian scientists have made a discovery based on a totally new and highly promising course of action that could help solve a serious public health problem.
It's already been almost four decades since the last generation of antibiotics was developed, allowing new resistances to emerge in bacterial populations. This is a major public health problem on a global scale, which, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), causes 1.27 million deaths a year worldwide, including more than 500 in Belgium, and is only getting worse.
A Belgian biotech company, Santero Therapeutics, has set out to tackle this problem. This start-up, created as a ULB spin-off in 2021 with operational headquarters in Mont-Saint-Guibert (Walloon Brabant province), has just announced a major discovery that should enable a new generation of antibiotics to be developed.
The team, led by Professors Cédric Govaerts and Abel Garcia-Pino, has opted for an innovative approach aimed at tackling bacteria's resistance to chemical stress, and the project's first in vivo result has just been achieved. The laboratory experiment demonstrated that the injected molecules reduced infection in the blood of a mouse suffering from septicaemia by up to 100 times.
Now, the aim is to extend this discovery into real drug development. Clinical trials in humans should follow within the next three years, with the hope of subsequently being able to better combat a wide range of bacterial pathogens which today pose a real threat to public health.