Nathi Magubane, Penn Today
Since the discovery of penicillin nearly a century ago, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has become a stealthy, pervasive enemy in the fight against bacterial infections. AMR claims an estimated 1.27 million lives a year and contributed to nearly five million deaths in 2019, placing drug-resistant bacterial infections ahead of HIV and malaria as a global health threat.
To counter that trend, a cross-disciplinary team representing four schools at the University of Pennsylvania led by Hydar Ali and César de la Fuente has devised a new way to treat infections. Their findings, published in Cell Biomaterials, identified a handful of short, positively charged peptides that can both rip open bacterial membranes and rally the body’s immune defenses.
“The winning candidates are built from D-amino acids, the mirror images of the L-amino acids our bodies use,” says de la Fuente, a Presidential Associate Professor in the Perelman School of Medicine. “That simple flip makes the peptides almost invisible to the body’s digestive enzymes, so they stay intact and effective far longer than earlier peptide drugs.”