Dr Monica Gerth wants to become bacteria’s equivalent of a horse whisperer.
In a world fast running out of effective antibiotics, she and other researchers at the University of Otago’s biochemistry department want to swap the shoot-on-sight attitude to disease-causing microbes for a more soothing approach.
Dr Gerth is developing an innovative way of "calming" bacteria before they can cause infection. If effective, it could provide a new, less harmful means of preventing up to two-thirds of all human infections.
Many of our most deadly bacteria hang out on our skin or in our noses or respiratory tracts, but do not cause disease.
Meningococcus, listeria, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Staphylococcus aureus; they all cause nasty and potentially fatal diseases. But each of them can be found in a quarter of human noses, doing not much.
It is only when they somehow get excited that they go from co-existing to overgrowth to disease-causing. When overgrowth begins, many bacteria produce a biofilm, an inorganic matrix that allows them to evade antibiotics and grow undisturbed.
That is the point in the process that Dr Gerth’s research is focused on.
"My research group is targeting a process that many bacterial pathogens use to communicate with one another, called quorum sensing," she says.
"We are engineering enzymes that work by degrading the chemical signals used by bacteria for quorum sensing.
"Blocking this communication stops biofilm formation before it can start, thus preventing a serious infection from occurring."
This process would have a massive advantage compared with traditional antibiotics. It does not try to kill the bacteria so it does not give the bacteria any reason to fight back and develop resistance.
Dr Gerth plans to file a provisional patent on the bacteria-calming enzyme later this year, but an effective product is probably still several years away.
