Antibiotic resistance is increasing, and new antibiotics are desperately needed to combat infections. The project group will use innovative screening technologies to identify new potential antibiotics and the genes that code for their biosynthesis. These data will enable the bacteria to be used as cell factories to produce large quantities of antibiotics. The project will identify thousands of unknown genes that are involved in synthesizing antibiotics and will develop new biosynthetic production processes. Most important of all, the project will discover molecules that can potentially be developed into antibiotics.
“Our current antibiotics rapidly become ineffective, subjecting people to the risk of dying from even simple infections. We need to find new antibiotics now – and we need to optimize how we discover them,” says Tilmann Weber.
Tilmann Weber, Senior Researcher, Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability, Technical University of Denmark
Sang Yup Lee, Professor, Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, South Korea; and Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability, Technical University of Denmark
Bernhard O. Palsson, Professor, Department of Bioengineering, University of California, San Diego, United States; and CEO, Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability, Technical University of Denmark
Olga Genilloud, Scientific Director, Fundación MEDINA, Granada, Spain