Posted: 15 August 2023
New antibacterial medicines are urgently needed to respond to the problem of emerging drug-resistance.
Causing more than 100,000 deaths a year globally, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) – also known as Golden Staph – has been listed by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a ‘high-priority’ pathogen urgently requiring the development of new antimicrobial agents.
A team of Monash researchers has received funding of $450,000 to look for new antibiotics to combat MRSA. The Australian Government has subsidised 90% of the grant, with Monash University contributing 10%.
Led by Dr Jhih-Hang Jiang and Professor Anton Peleg, the team of Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute (BDI) and Central Clinical School (CCS) researchers will use the research grant to fast-track their discoveries into new medicines.
The grant will give the team access to the National Drug Discovery Centre (NDDC), based at the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute. The facilities at the NDDC provide ultra-high throughput screening of 300,000 compounds, enabling rapid assessment of the potential drug candidates.
Dr Jiang is a senior post-doctoral fellow in Professor Peleg’s antimicrobial resistance (AMR) pathogenesis laboratory at Monash University’s BDI and CCS. He aims to discover inhibitors of a critical S. aureus enzyme that is essential to antibiotic resistance and host immune evasion.
“We have identified an exciting new target in MRSA and plan to screen several hundred thousand compounds to find at least one that may someday become an important new antibiotic,” Dr Jiang said.
Professor Peleg said, “This project will be a collaborative work with Dr Ylva Bozikis at the Australian Translational Medicinal Chemistry Facility. Dr Bozikis has 15 years of industry experience in drug discovery. She will guide the drug discovery in mining the high-throughput screening deck and synthesising analogues to advance the project.”
Professor Peleg said that this project directly resulted from the 2021-2024 National Health and Medical Research Council Ideas grant, ‘Targeting Antimicrobial Resistance and Host Immune Evasion in Staphylococcus aureus’, for which he is the lead researcher.
To read about the other research projects to receive Australian Government subsidies to access the NDDC facilities, see WEHI news story.
