Developing anti-resistance antibiotics possible: Yonath

Ada Yonath, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009, has said that “it is possible to develop anti-resistance specific antibiotics by designing pathogen specific antibiotics”’. Delivering a lecture on the theme of “Towards a New Generation of Antibiotics” at the Gujarat University here on Wednesday, she said that since antibiotics targetted ribosomes and ribosomoes structure and functions had now been completely studied, anti-resistance antibiotics could be developed by “identification of the type of relevant pathogen and unique structural features of ribosomes in each and every pathogen”’. Yonath was awarded Nobel prize for her pioneering work on ribosome structure and functions by using crystallographic techniques.

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Elaborating it further, she said that by determining the structure of ribosomes from pathogenic bacteria that caused diseases, it was possible “to increase antibiotics effectiveness and also increase antibiotics selectivity’’.
Yonath said that by designing a pathogen specific antibiotics, targetting each and every type of harmful pathogen or bacteria, would help reduce to the smallest level the harm caused to unharmful bacteria or micro-organisms in human micribiome, resulting into more specific cure for diseases caused by pathogens and this would, consequently, lower the amount of antibiotic resistance.
Yonath is currently the director of KimmelmanCentre for Biomolecular Structure at Weizmann Institute in Israel.