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Strategies to Combat Antibiotic Resistance

A major unmet clinical need in infectious disease is to discover new drugs to treat resistant bacterial infections.  Resistant Gram-negative bacteria are particularly challenging to kill because they have intrinsic resistance to many of the existing classes of antibiotics.  These bacteria contain a double layer of membranes, and the outermost membrane is impenetrable to many antibiotics due to its unusual structure.  Discovery of compounds that interfere with outer membrane assembly would allow us to repurpose many drugs which are not currently used to treat Gram-negative infections only because they cannot reach their cellular targets.  My lab seeks to understand the protein machinery necessary for proper assembly of this membrane barrier, as well as the mechanisms that lead to defects.  Our discoveries have facilitated the development of a new class of antibiotics currently undergoing clinical trials. 

Read more about the Kahne Research Group here