Franz Receives Wellcome Leap Funding to Develop Safer Antibiotics
Katherine J. Franz, the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, and Daniel Reker, an assistant professor of Biomedical Engineering, were recently awarded funding through Wellcome Leap’s Focused Antibiotics program to develop a new approach to treating bacterial infections—one designed to spare the gut microbiome, while still effectively eliminating disease-causing bacteria.
Wellcome Leap is a U.S. nonprofit founded by the Wellcome Trust to accelerate breakthroughs in human health. It represents a new model for research—designed to be fast, agile, and networked across disciplines, organizations, and countries. The Duke team is one of only 16 research teams from around the world selected to participate in the Focused Antibiotics program, which will provide up to $50 million in total funding to develop new approaches to combat antibiotic resistance by reducing the unintended effects of antibiotic treatment.
The Franz-Reker team aims to redesign medicines that are already clinically established, potentially preserving their effectiveness while eliminating an important source of collateral damage. Their approach combines artificial intelligence with a class of drugs known as prodrugs––medications that are administered in an inactive form and then converted inside the body into an active drug when it reaches the desired tissue––like an automated “on-switch” for medicines.