The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Meet the Students Fighting Antibiotic Resistance

Episode Date: April 29, 2024

Antimicrobial resistance - when germs are no longer responsive to the drugs used to treat them - is a growing concern in public health. It's estimated by 2050, 10 million people could die if new antibiotics are not discovered. Jeyan Jeganathan visits Carleton University where student scientists are hoping to unearth a solution to the global threat.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Student scientists at Carleton University are on the hunt for a solution. For the past two years, they've been wandering parts of the Ottawa area, turning over rocks and walking along waterways in hopes of collecting the perfect soil sample. We're actually right beside a groundhog hole. There's some nice moss and other plant life in the area and right on the banks of the river. ALEX SMYTH- Students like Carly aren't interested in the dirt itself, but rather the millions of bacteria that live in it.

Bacteria are all around us. These tiny microorganisms can't be seen with the naked eye, yet they can make us extremely sick. However, some bacteria produce antibiotics that can fight off infection. So make sure you don't touch the ends of the spatulas again. Students at Carleton are hoping to discover new bacteria to help fight a growing concern in public health, antibiotic resistance. Antimicrobial resistance is really when these antibiotics or antimicrobials that we have don't work anymore. It kind of works just through natural evolution where the bacteria or the other microorganisms, they will adapt to their

environment. And so if we continuously expose them to different antibiotics, for example, we're creating an environment that will allow them essentially to adapt. LAURA BAIN- Laura Pickell is an instructor at Carleton University's Department of Health Sciences. With the help of student scientists, she's helping to discover new antibiotics in an untapped resource.

LAURA PICKELL- We know that most of the antibiotics that we have are actually naturally derived from microorganisms and most of which actually we find in the soil. And so the strategies that we've always used in the past has been to try to find bacteria that live in different environments that naturally produce antibiotics and we try to sort of discover them and find new ones that might work against the resistant bacteria. According to Pacal, many pharmaceutical companies are no longer interested in antibiotic research because it's not a profitable venture. Because it takes you know up to a decade to fully develop antibiotics through the pipeline as well as you know millions and

millions of dollars. And in the end, there might be just a few people, like a small proportion of people who we're going to give these antibiotics to. These companies are not going to make their money back. And so there's been a huge disinvestment in industry in terms of developing these new antibiotics. And a lot of it has been left then to academia. According to the World Health Organization, developing these new antibiotics and a lot of it has been left then to academia. According to the World Health Organization, antimicrobial resistance is one of the top

global public health threats. At the World Economic Forum, it was predicted that antibiotic resistance could kill 10 million people annually by 2050. We often hear about the misuse and overuse of antibiotics within the healthcare system, but human patients aren't the only driver of antibiotic resistance. But we also find it in agriculture, particularly the animal for food production. It allows these resistant microorganisms to grow within our food systems, it trickles into our water, and then we consume or we come into contact with animals

that might carry these various resistant microorganisms. So the World Health Organization has predicted that if we don't do something about this crisis that we are in, and it's considered a global health crisis, that in a couple of decades, that the most prominent cause of death in humans is going to be these resistant strains. The problem is especially alarming since some of the most well-known bacteria are now becoming resistant to antibiotics. So tuberculosis is an example of that, where we have these extreme drug-resistant forms that are coming out

that we actually have no antibiotics against at all. So we really need to work on solving this problem. Anil Galapudi is a laboratory coordinator at Carleton University, who works with the student scientists to grow the bacteria they've unearthed. Basically, this is the media that supports the growth of the bacteria. So we grow the bacteria in the lab on a media in these plates called Petri dishes. Pekal and Galapudi are part of a global project known as the Tiny Earth Initiative. The program has two goals.

Help solve the antibiotic resistance crisis by discovering antibiotics and soil bacteria and help give students authentic research experience. Tiny Earth is an international collaborative. It was started by Dr. Jo Handelsman, who is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And she saw this really great resource that we have that we could tap into to help solve this problem, which is our thousands and thousands of undergraduate students across the world who

are really eager to get into research and to participate in solving a lot of these problems. We could really increase our chances of finding new antibiotics, as well as getting young students early in their scientific careers to really engage with research, an authentic type of research where they get to take ownership of their own projects. So this is probably one of the few labs where you're doing an entire big project over the entire semester. So using my soil sample, which is

what I carried on with through the entire nine weeks, we do various tests. what I carried on with through the entire nine weeks. We do various tests. The test only needs one gram of soil which can contain a million bacteria. The first step is diluting the soil samples with a saline solution. Then the solution is spread onto petri dishes where the bacteria will grow into colonies. The colonies are then tested to see if they can produce an antibiotic that will inhibit other types of bacteria.

And then they're going to test it against some known microorganisms to see if they can inhibit growth of that bacteria. They'll spread another plate of petri dish full of agar with a known type of bacteria. They're known as escape pathogens that have been named by the WHO as the ones that are posing the greatest risk to us. The students will take the bacteria that they've isolated from their soil, they will put it on the plate and then they will see if it can actually stop the growth of those escape-safe cousins.

And you can see here, there's a clear zone where you don't see any bacterial growth around the antibiotic. So the antibiotic basically is not allowing the growth of the bacteria in its vicinity. So that makes this particular antibiotic effective against this particular bacteria. In this case, it's E. coli. Once the students have successfully identified a promising bacteria, they will continue running tests, documenting their findings, and inputting them into the Tiny Earth database

with the hope that it will be developed into antibiotic medications. I think that was probably my favourite part about this lab. It's that it's not just a lab where you have a lab protocol follow through and then the next day it's something else. This was a lab where you actually had control and you could do a particular test several times if you needed to and to know that you actually have you're playing a role in potentially making something really helpful for the world. I think that not only puts a sense of responsibility, but also a sense of pride because you know that you're doing this for a good cause and not just for grades.

We certainly hope that we can identify new antibiotics to get into the pipeline to solve this problem and to continue doing so so that we can always try to stay one step ahead of the bacteria who are evolving so quickly and then on the other hand the hope is that we can really improve the diversity and retention of students and sciences so that they will you know continue on and they're our future in terms of developing and solving these big problems of today. Thank you.