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NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals
NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals is a privately held, early-stage biotechnology company focused on the discovery and development of new drugs from natural sources. Early history and focus The company was founded in 2003 in Cambridge, MA (USA), by Northeastern University professors Kim Lewis and Slava Epstein. Lewis is the director of Northeastern’s Antimicrobial Discovery Center, while Epstein is on the faculty of the Department of Biology. Both Lewis and Epstein are paid consultants to this company. The focus of the company is on the discovery of new antibiotics and oncology drugs. Research and drug development The founders had led the development of new techniques to search for useful molecules produced by the untapped vast majority of soil and marine bacteria that cannot be initially cultured in the laboratory. They developed diffusion chambers ( isolation chips) to be embedded in natural settings to grow "uncultivable" microorganisms ''in situ'', so that they could then be ext ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston, Worcester, and Springfield. It is one of two de jure county seats of Middlesex County, although the county's executive government was abolished in 1997. Situated directly north of Boston, across the Charles River, it was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, once also an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Lesley University, and Hult International Business School are in Cambridge, as was Radcliffe College before it merged with Harvard. Kendall Square in Cambridge has been called "the most innovative square mile on the planet" owing to the high concentration of successful startups that have emerged in the vicinity ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Northeastern University
Northeastern University (NU) is a private university, private research university with its main campus in Boston. Established in 1898, the university offers undergraduate and graduate programs on its main campus as well as satellite campuses in Charlotte, North Carolina; Seattle, Washington; San Jose, California; Oakland, California; Portland, Maine; and Toronto and Vancouver in Canada. In 2019, Northeastern purchased the New College of the Humanities in London, England. The university's enrollment is approximately 19,000 undergraduate students and 8,600 graduate students. It is Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, classified among List of research universities in the United States, "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". Northeastern faculty and alumni include Nobel Prize laureates, Rhodes, Truman, Marshall, and Churchill scholars. Undergraduate admission to the university is categorized as "most selective." Northeastern features a c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Antimicrobial Discovery Center
An antimicrobial is an agent that kills microorganisms or stops their growth. Antimicrobial medicines can be grouped according to the microorganisms they act primarily against. For example, antibiotics are used against bacteria, and antifungals are used against fungi. They can also be classified according to their function. Agents that kill microbes are microbicides, while those that merely inhibit their growth are called bacteriostatic agents. The use of antimicrobial medicines to treat infection is known as antimicrobial chemotherapy, while the use of antimicrobial medicines to prevent infection is known as antimicrobial prophylaxis. The main classes of antimicrobial agents are disinfectants (non-selective agents, such as bleach), which kill a wide range of microbes on non-living surfaces to prevent the spread of illness, antiseptics (which are applied to living tissue and help reduce infection during surgery), and antibiotics (which destroy microorganisms within the body). The t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Isolation Chip
The Isolation chip (or ichip) is a method of culturing bacteria. Using regular methods, 99% of bacterial species are not able to be cultured as they do not grow in conditions made in a laboratory, a problem called the "Great Plate Count Anomaly". The ichip instead cultures bacterial species within its soil environment. The soil is diluted in molten agar and nutrients such that only a single cell, on average, grows in the ichip's small compartments or wells, hence the term "isolation". The chip is then enclosed in a semipermeable plastic membrane and buried back in the dirt to allow in nutrients not available in the lab. With this culturing method, about 50 to 60 percent of bacterial species are able to survive. Notably, the bacterial species ''Eleftheria terrae'', which makes the antibiotic teixobactin that has shown promise against many drug-resistant strains like methicillin-resistant ''Staphylococcus aureus'', was discovered using the ichip in 2015. In addition to antibiotics, it ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Teixobactin
Teixobactin () is a peptide-like secondary metabolite of some species of bacteria, that kills some gram-positive bacteria. It appears to belong to a new class of antibiotics, and harms bacteria by binding to lipid II and lipid III, important precursor molecules for forming the cell wall. Teixobactin was discovered using a new method of culturing bacteria in soil, which allowed researchers to grow a previously unculturable bacterium now named ''Eleftheria terrae'', which produces the antibiotic. Teixobactin was shown to kill ''Staphylococcus aureus'' and ''Mycobacterium tuberculosis''. History In January 2015, a collaboration of four institutes in the US and Germany together with two pharmaceutical companies, reported that they had isolated and characterized a new antibiotic, killing "without detectable resistance." Teixobactin was discovered by screening previously unculturable bacteria present in a sample of soil from "a grassy field in Maine," using the isolation chip (iChi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Antibiotic
An antibiotic is a type of antimicrobial substance active against bacteria. It is the most important type of antibacterial agent for fighting bacterial infections, and antibiotic medications are widely used in the treatment and prevention of such infections. They may either kill or inhibit the growth of bacteria. A limited number of antibiotics also possess antiprotozoal activity. Antibiotics are not effective against viruses such as the common cold or influenza; drugs which inhibit viruses are termed antiviral drugs or antivirals rather than antibiotics. Sometimes, the term ''antibiotic''—literally "opposing life", from the Greek roots ἀντι ''anti'', "against" and βίος ''bios'', "life"—is broadly used to refer to any substance used against microbes, but in the usual medical usage, antibiotics (such as penicillin) are those produced naturally (by one microorganism fighting another), whereas non-antibiotic antibacterials (such as sulfonamides and antiseptics) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pathogen
In biology, a pathogen ( el, πάθος, "suffering", "passion" and , "producer of") in the oldest and broadest sense, is any organism or agent that can produce disease. A pathogen may also be referred to as an infectious agent, or simply a germ. The term ''pathogen'' came into use in the 1880s. Typically, the term ''pathogen'' is used to describe an ''infectious'' microorganism or agent, such as a virus, bacterium, protozoan, prion, viroid, or fungus. Small animals, such as helminths and insects, can also cause or transmit disease. However, these animals are usually referred to as parasites rather than pathogens. The scientific study of microscopic organisms, including microscopic pathogenic organisms, is called microbiology, while parasitology refers to the scientific study of parasites and the organisms that host them. There are several pathways through which pathogens can invade a host. The principal pathways have different episodic time frames, but soil has the longest ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gram-positive Bacteria
In bacteriology, gram-positive bacteria are bacteria that give a positive result in the Gram stain test, which is traditionally used to quickly classify bacteria into two broad categories according to their type of cell wall. Gram-positive bacteria take up the crystal violet stain used in the test, and then appear to be purple-coloured when seen through an optical microscope. This is because the thick peptidoglycan layer in the bacterial cell wall retains the stain after it is washed away from the rest of the sample, in the decolorization stage of the test. Conversely, gram-negative bacteria cannot retain the violet stain after the decolorization step; alcohol used in this stage degrades the outer membrane of gram-negative cells, making the cell wall more porous and incapable of retaining the crystal violet stain. Their peptidoglycan layer is much thinner and sandwiched between an inner cell membrane and a bacterial outer membrane, causing them to take up the counterstain (sa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Drug Resistance
Drug resistance is the reduction in effectiveness of a medication such as an antimicrobial or an antineoplastic in treating a disease or condition. The term is used in the context of resistance that pathogens or cancers have "acquired", that is, resistance has evolved. Antimicrobial resistance and antineoplastic resistance challenge clinical care and drive research. When an organism is resistant to more than one drug, it is said to be multidrug-resistant. The development of antibiotic resistance in particular stems from the drugs targeting only specific bacterial molecules (almost always proteins). Because the drug is ''so'' specific, any mutation in these molecules will interfere with or negate its destructive effect, resulting in antibiotic resistance. Furthermore, there is mounting concern over the abuse of antibiotics in the farming of livestock, which in the European Union alone accounts for three times the volume dispensed to humans – leading to development of super-resi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid digital subscribers. It also is a producer of popular podcasts such as '' The Daily''. Founded in 1851 by Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones, it was initially published by Raymond, Jones & Company. The ''Times'' has won 132 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any newspaper, and has long been regarded as a national " newspaper of record". For print it is ranked 18th in the world by circulation and 3rd in the U.S. The paper is owned by the New York Times Company, which is publicly traded. It has been governed by the Sulzberger family since 1896, through a dual-class share structure after its shares became publicly traded. A. G. Sulzberger, the paper's publisher and the company's chairman, is the fifth generation of the family to head the pa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nature (journal)
''Nature'' is a British weekly scientific journal founded and based in London, England. As a multidisciplinary publication, ''Nature'' features peer-reviewed research from a variety of academic disciplines, mainly in science and technology. It has core editorial offices across the United States, continental Europe, and Asia under the international scientific publishing company Springer Nature. ''Nature'' was one of the world's most cited scientific journals by the Science Edition of the 2019 ''Journal Citation Reports'' (with an ascribed impact factor of 42.778), making it one of the world's most-read and most prestigious academic journals. , it claimed an online readership of about three million unique readers per month. Founded in autumn 1869, ''Nature'' was first circulated by Norman Lockyer and Alexander Macmillan as a public forum for scientific innovations. The mid-20th century facilitated an editorial expansion for the journal; ''Nature'' redoubled its efforts in exp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Teixobactin
Teixobactin () is a peptide-like secondary metabolite of some species of bacteria, that kills some gram-positive bacteria. It appears to belong to a new class of antibiotics, and harms bacteria by binding to lipid II and lipid III, important precursor molecules for forming the cell wall. Teixobactin was discovered using a new method of culturing bacteria in soil, which allowed researchers to grow a previously unculturable bacterium now named ''Eleftheria terrae'', which produces the antibiotic. Teixobactin was shown to kill ''Staphylococcus aureus'' and ''Mycobacterium tuberculosis''. History In January 2015, a collaboration of four institutes in the US and Germany together with two pharmaceutical companies, reported that they had isolated and characterized a new antibiotic, killing "without detectable resistance." Teixobactin was discovered by screening previously unculturable bacteria present in a sample of soil from "a grassy field in Maine," using the isolation chip (iChi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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