Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

The ability of drugs to treat many deadly diseases is decreasing due to antibiotic resistance. This is especially worrisome for Gram-negative bacteria, which have high natural resistance to many currently used antibiotics. Pharmaceutical companies rarely invest in creating new antibiotics because it can cost up to 1 billion dollars and take as long as 15 years to make a single new drug. Much of the work in developing effective antibiotics for doctors to prescribe now falls on academics. From decades of work on antibiotic development, there is much to be learned to guide future advances. To leverage these discoveries, I will examine how a large set of antibiotics affects cellular processes essential for bacterial life. My approach applies to many bacteria that cause life-threatening infection. How bacteria respond to these antibiotics will be extracted and used to develop an artificial intelligence system. This program will scan chemical databases of millions of compounds and predict new antibiotic structures, which I will test for their ability to kill bacteria resistant to current antibiotics. Ultimately, my goal is to develop new antibiotics that will be used in the clinic to treat bacterial infection and save lives.