Dr David Roper has been awarded £1.1M from BBSRC-LINK grant for his project on ‘Tools and Reagents for Next Generation Inhibitor Discovery in Peptidoglycan biosynthesis’.

The two-year project will be carried out in collaboration with industrial partner Merck Pharmaceuticals and includes Prof Chris Dowson and Dr Adrian Lloyd from the School of Life Sciences as co-investigators. Antimicrobial resistance to existing antibiotics threatens future healthcare at multiple levels and has been acknowledged as a worldwide issue with an impact as important as climate change. However, a number of factors has led to a steady decline in the discovery and development of antimicrobials in the pharmaceutical industry despite the clear clinical need. This study will investigate the enzymes involved in an early stage of bacterial cell wall synthesis as a target for new antimicrobial drugs. The project seeks to gain the essential knowledge required to explore these enzymes for next generation antibiotics. The team will generate a series of specialist chemical probes to interrogate the mechanism by which these enzymes work, determine the structures of these probes bound to the enzymes, and generate new assays that will allow the discovery of future antibiotics.