Developing new therapies to combat drug-resistant bacteria
Assoc Prof Kevin Pethe of NTU’s Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine aims to find novel approaches to treat antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative agent of tuberculosis (TB), is challenging to treat due to the rapid spread of multidrug-resistant strains and the lack of effective drugs.
Assoc Prof Kevin Pethe of NTU’s Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine is developing new therapies against multidrug-resistant TB and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, through the project, “Bacterial metabolic adaptation during host colonisation and persistence”.
“We aim to find novel approaches to treat bacterial infections by unravelling weaknesses in bacterial metabolism
and studying the bioenergetics of invading bacteria and the host, including the impact of dietary micronutrients on
gut microbiota,” he says.
The article appeared first in NTU’s research & innovation magazine Pushing Frontiers (issue #19, August 2021).