Team:Oxford/Backdrop

The Problem

Antimicrobial resistance is an increasingly serious threat to global public health and is an issue in all parts of the world, and one of the ways through which bacteria confer themselves protection against antimicrobial drugs is the growing of biofilms. Biofilms, or “bacterial slime”, are responsible for a whole host of medical, industrial and environmental problems that are very costly and technically challenging to remedy. The scale of the problem is huge, with up to 80% of all infections involving the formation of a biofilm. Some examples where biofilms pose especially big an issue are urinary tract infections (UTIs), catheter and implant infections, dental plaque formation as well as infections in cystic fibrosis patients. In industry and infrastructure, biofilms are also the main culprit behind the fouling of various plants and pipelines for aquaculture, water treatment, and food production.

Both antimicrobial resistance and the other problems associated with biofilm formation are big issues in their own right but are especially problematic when they’re combined. The bacteria, already constantly evolving to afford themselves more innate resistance against antibiotics, produce biofilms as protective layers that shield them from the drugs even more comprehensively.

To find out more about biofilms and antibiotic resistance in the context of urinary tract infections, please follow this link.

Our Aim

There is currently no commercial antibiotic that specifically targets bacterial biofilms, but researchers have identified a range of bacterially-derived biomolecules that degrade and destroy biofilms. As such, we aim to engineer strains of bacteria that produce and secrete enzymes which destroy the pathogenic bacteria and the biofilms they make. The beauty of the anti-biofilm agents we plan to use is that they have been shown not to induce resistance in the target bacteria, meaning that having them continually produced at a low level will not be nearly bad as with traditional antibiotics. Our system is applicable to a whole host of biofilm environments and with a simple design that can be used in multiple sectors, we hope to get a step further in providing a novel approach to treating microbial infections.

In terms of product formulation and design, we hope to ultimately arrive at a functional proof-of-concept e.g. an enzyme-secreting infection-clearing catheter or a modular system that continuously and cheaply cleans out pipelines, and to achieve that we have a 16-strong interdisciplinary team comprising 1 engineer, 2 physicists, 2 chemists, 2 biologists, and 9 biochemists working on different aspects of the project in parallel.

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