SMART and NTU researchers design polymer that can kill drug-resistant bacteria
Researchers from Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have designed an antimicrobial polymer that can kill bacteria resistant to commonly used antibiotics, including the superbug methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). The breakthrough can pave the way for the development of medicine to which bacteria have a significantly slower rate of developing resistance, and help prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths each year caused by drug-resistant bacteria. The new polymer is explained in a paper published last month in Nature Communications. It was jointly published by a group of scientists at NTU and SMART's Antimicrobial Resistance Interdisciplinary Research Group (AMR IRG) and led by Mary Chan-Park, SMART AMR principal investigator and professor at NTU’s School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering; and Kevin Pethe, associate professor at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine at NTU. Increasing resistance to antimicrobial medicine is a cause for...