Any news from Micrologix regarding their relationship with PENCE?
I noticed an article, in the June/99 issue of the U of A Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry News, titled Fighting Mutating Bacteria with New Weapons of Destruction.
"...That increasingly urgent fight against multi-drug resistant strains of bacteria took centre stage at the 40th annual National Student Research Forum held earlier this spring at the University of Texas, when University of Alberta MD student Jeffery Man captured the top prize in the biochemistry/molecular biology category.
Man spent the previous summer working under the tutelage of Protein Engineering Networks of Centres of Excellence researchers Robert Hodges and Les Kondejewski. That work focussed on designing drugs to which microorganisms will be likely to develop resistance. The researchers are using a naturally occurring, antimicrobial peptide, Gramicidin S, to attack the cell membranes of bacteria. Their goal is to devellop an effective way of attacking the bacteria's cell membrane, to destroy the integrity of the cell, and yet leave the healthy eukaryotic cells untouched.
"We now have something that works in a test tube," says Dr. Kondehewski. "It kills bugs and not blood cells. Our next step is to test these compounds on other cell types and conduct research in vivo."
The team has developed highly active antimicrobial peptides with high specificity for bacteria over eukaryotic cells.
Man's student work, which was funded by a summer studentship from the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical REsearch, is part of a much broader scope of work that began in PENCE on a relatively small scale. That effort now encompasses a host of researchers and is backed by Micrologix Biotech Inc..." |
