The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and UCL (University College London) have engineered a brand new artificial virus that kills bacteria on the first contact, as published in Nature Communications. Antibiotic resistance has become an ever-growing global challenge, with more than 700,000 people across the world dying from drug-resistant infections every year. As a result, antibiotic discovery has fallen well behind its historical rate, with traditional discovery methods being exhausted.
NPL is addressing technology and innovation challenges in response to this, including support for the implementation of synthetic/engineering biology. In line with NPL's approach to addressing the global threat of antimicrobial resistance by helping to develop new antibiotics, a team of researchers from NPL and UCL have engineered a purely artificial virus, which has the ability to kill bacteria on…
