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Synthesizing Antimicrobial Peptides to Battle Bacteria & Cancer

Tubes, catheters, and other artificial points of access into patients' bodies allow the direct delivery of drugs and nutrients, help with breathing, and more. Yet these conduits also pose a risk. If bacteria can get into them, they have a shortcut past the patient's defenses. Erdogan Gulari, professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan, believes that these devices could be made to fight off the bacteria with a coating of antimicrobial molecules. Gulari's team is working to synthesize and find antimicrobial peptides that will battle selective targets such as cancer.

Topics:
Coatings & Adhesives Drug Delivery Materials Medical

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    Transcript

    00:00:03 if you look at nature frogs live in very dirty environments they get injured but they their injuries heal on their skin and that's all because frogs have one of the richest well one of the largest number of antimicrobial peptides In Their Skin and you look at it these peptides some of them are spread throughout the nature which means

    00:00:29 pathogens have not been able to find defenses against them and we saw that it clicked the plates basically are our testing and growing factories in the sense that we transfer the genes that have the instructions for the peptides into eoli and these genes are expressed and the peptides are synthesized in eoli we spray the surface of the eoli containing

    00:00:57 plates with a solution or a gel of the pathogen that we are trying to test against if it is being killed then we have these nice clean clear areas around the eoli colonies we have found some peptides that are basically Universal cell catchers or cell traps it's like the fly trap if a bacterial cell or microbial cell lands there they are held and taken

    00:01:27 apart killed these can have important uses in the sense that we can put them onto surfaces for example things like skin cancer which would be fine we could find the peptide that will attack skin cancer because it surface my mother had cancer it was an unusual cancer and she had something like 20 30 operations and you you'll see hear this

    00:01:57 story from Engineers who are in cancer field they typically end up having a family member and they get curious whether as Engineers we could do something I mean Engineers after all are supposed to change lives for the better so you can think of this as me moving to an area where I can have an impact faster