University of Regina professor leads new research into tackling antimicrobial resistance

WATCH: A U of R professor and researchers are hoping to discover an antibiotic for antimicrobial resistance. Angela Stewart has the story.

It’s become a global health crisis and has been around for decades. Researchers have been working to find treatment options for antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

“The resistant bacteria pose a severe threat to the public health. That’s why people are very much interested in designing the next generation antibiotics,” said Dr. Mohan Babu, a professor of Biochemistry and Chancellor’s Research Chair in Network Biology at the University of Regina.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), AMR happens when a bacteria or virus are no longer responsive to medication, which makes them significantly harder to treat with medication. It also increases the risk of spread.

• New antibiotic uses novel method to target deadly drug-resistant bacteria, study says

For the last seven years, Babu has been leading a new study along with the help of researchers and professors to look at how proteins and small molecules interact inside bacterial cells using AI technology.

“Given the fact that now the AI is being developing so much, we don’t even have to screen experimentally thousands of compounds, but now we can virtually screen them,” he said.

The WHO estimates there were more than 1 million deaths directly caused by AMR in 2019. It contributed to nearly 5 million other deaths.

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Khaled Aly, a group leader in Babu’s lab said there have not been any new antibiotics created to stop or slow down AMR in the last four decades.

“That shows that we are still reliant on the very old inventions and discoveries to treat patients up until today. This is another issue that we need to find a way to get over.”

Through Babu’s study, the team hopes to discover a new antibiotic in the future.

“A healthy way of looking at things in life is how to help people and one of the most vulnerable communities is the patient communities,” Aly said.

The team will take their research to pre-clinical trials and eventually move to a hospital setting.