LIVING

In Ribas’s lab they work on understanding how protein synthesis machinery works in cells: if they can disrupt the way a pathogen’s protein works, they can debilitate it. While studying these proteins, Lluis and his colleagues came across something else—an entirely new way of developing antibiotics. He has started a company called Omnia Molecular to make new antibiotics, and he estimates that whereas they used to cost $7 million and take eight years to produce, they will now only cost about $300,000, and take three months.

“Traditionally, pharmaceutical companies identify the enzyme, or protein, that they want to destroy and then set about finding a molecule that will kill it. The problem with this method is that once the molecule has been found, extensive tests then have to be done to make sure it doesn’t have an aggressive effect on other proteins in the body. This new way puts the target enzyme in the context of all the other enzymes that must be respected, and within that context finds a drug that will only kill the target, without affecting the other proteins.”

Antibiotics are vital and medicine relies on them. But at the end of the day they are flawed: the day will come when bacteria will defeat any new, strong antibiotic that we can formulate. Clearly, we need alternatives, but apart from natural remedies like homeopathy, the only alternative is something called ‘bacteriophage’ , or simply ‘phage’, technology. Bacteriophages are the naturally occurring viral enemies of bacteria, and are said to destroy them while leaving human tissue unharmed. As yet they have not been developed, or even acknowledged properly by many scientific communities, and Ribas smiles at the suggestion that phage technology may be an option. But then again, he would.

Whether or not phage technology will take off, or Ribas’s system of producing new antibiotics will be just what medicine needs, the message is still the same, he said. “Misusing antibiotics has three main problems: it causes antibiotic resistance in the long term; it can have detrimental side effects, and apart from that it’s simply a waste of money.”

You can’t argue with that.