On Sunday, CO-ADD Director Professor Matt Cooper was invited by the Today TV Show for an interview on a new synthetic sugar that acts like a Trojan horse on bacteria cell wall, uncovered by his research group at the University of Queensland's Institute for Molecular Bioscience - Centre for Superbug Solutions and collaborators, and published in Nature Communications. CO-ADD Program coordinators Dr Johannes Zuegg and Dr Alysha Elliott are also authors on the paper.

"Carbohydrate scaffolds as glycosyltransferase inhibitors with in vivo antibacterial activity"

Johannes Zuegg, Craig Muldoon, George Adamson, Declan McKeveney, Giang Le Thanh, Rajaratnam Premraj, Bernd Becker, Mu Cheng, Alysha G. Elliott, Johnny X. Huang, Mark S. Butler, Megha Bajaj, Joachim Seifert, Latika Singh, Nicola F. Galley, David I. Roper, Adrian J. Lloyd, Christopher G. Dowson, Ting-Jen Cheng, Wei-Chieh Cheng, Dieter Demon,    Evelyne Meyer, Wim Meutermans & Matthew A. Cooper

Nature Communications. July 21, 2015. doi:10.1038/ncomms8719

Every week in Australia, 170 people die of bacterial sepsis, and that number is going up every year. We could go back to the stage where you have a hip operation or a minor surgery, you pick up a superbug in hospital and you could loose your life. We don't want to go back to that past. Antibiotics were an amazing discovery, and we need to be smarter now, invest in new diagnostics and new therapeutics (> send compounds for antimicrobial screening)