Congratulations to EMBL Australia Group Leader Associate Professor Max Cryle, who has been awarded a Career Development Fellowship from the National Health and Medical Research Council.
The four-year fellowship will assist A/Prof Cryle and his team of researchers, based at the Biomedicine Discovery Institute, in their quest to battle antimicrobial resistance by improving on natural antibiotics.
Many bacteria have become resistant to existing antibiotics and there is an urgent need for new antibiotics and strategies to combat them. A/Prof Cryle’s research centres on the class of antibiotics that includes the last-resort therapy, vancomycin.
He aims to develop novel ways to kill bacteria with these antibiotics and, subsequently, to understand and re-engineer the ways in which these antibiotics are produced.
Ultimately, this will enable A/Prof Cryle’s team to develop new antibiotics to kill dangerous bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus.
A/Prof Cryle said given the challenging nature of antibiotic development, securing long-term funding was vital for his team.
“We are pursuing many exciting leads and this fellowship provides support at a crucial stage in our research to develop new agents to tackle the growing problem of antimicrobial resistance,” he said.