• Question: How will your experiment affect or help to the people?

    Asked by VladimirT to Ceri, Marikka, Matt, Rob, Sally on 7 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Marikka Beecroft

      Marikka Beecroft answered on 7 Nov 2014:

      Hi! This is an interesting question!
      My experiment or project is based around metals and how they’re used by bacteria and this is important for several reasons. Bacteria can switch from harmless to deadly by examining what and how much metal is around them, so investigating this can help create new drugs to help in the future.

      Also in the body, white blood cells kill bacteria by overloading or starving them of certain metals, trying to understand this can give us more information about how our bodies work and how some bacteria actually survive this attack. The experiments I am doing will hopefully help understand bacteria more so we can develop more antibiotics in the future.

    • Photo: Sally Cutler

      Sally Cutler answered on 7 Nov 2014:

      Absolutely! My work is fairly applied and has taken me to field work in African countries through to presenting my findings to policy makers. I cannot think of other jobs that can take you through such a variety of tasks such as collecting fleas from mud huts in Africa through to laboratory experiments, then to major scientific conferences.

    • Photo: Ceri Dare

      Ceri Dare answered on 7 Nov 2014:

      My main project at the moment is looking at whether you are more likely to have more antibiotic resistant infections if you are poor rather than rich, and why. This will help because if we can find out who is most likely to get ‘superbugs’, then we can try to prevent people getting ill in the first place.

      I studied Public Health because I really want to make the world a better place for everyone, and Public Health looks at everything from big questions about how society is organised, to tiny things like how small changes to bacteria affect how difficult they are to treat.

    • Photo: Robert Hampson

      Robert Hampson answered on 7 Nov 2014:

      I do many experiments in one project. Making a single new molecule takes many individual reactions. Every reaction has to be tried and tested and changed and improved by experiments. Once I finally have the molecule I want, I then have to test it on special types of my bacteria to see if it will have any effects on the system I am researching. The special types of bacteria have also taken many steps and experiments to create and test themselves by the biologists in our team. If the molecules has a desired effect on the system, we then extensively test it on the wild bacteria to see if the changes we want to see are actually happening.

      Another member of our team has some molecules which do really well at this stage, so now his molecules are being tested in real infections in animals to see if they can actually treat the bacterial infection successfully.

      If these molecules do treat the infection successfully then they will have to be tested for any nasty effects in animals and humans. How quickly the body either destroys them or removes them will also have to be improved. There will have to be experiments to determine how much is in a dose. There will be experiments on whether to deliver by pill or injection or as a liquid.

      If all of these experiments performed by all these people are successful, then the molecule may possibly become a new antibiotic. Just getting it past all the drug related regulations and rules can take 7 years. The entire process from finding a new useful molecule to becoming a new sale-able drug can often take up to 15-20 years.

      My individual experiments may not be massive in comparison to this giant effort, but if in the future many people can recover from untreatable bacterial infections partially because of my work then I will be incredibly happy!

    • Photo: Matt Bilton

      Matt Bilton answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      If the white blood cells I study are implicated more strongly in the way the immune system responds to tuberculosis bacteria, and are present at the site of disease in tuberculosis patients – then there is a stronger argument for considering these particular cells when designing new treatments and cures for tuberculosis. Hopefully this would translate into fewer people getting very sick and dying. This is quite a way removed from what I do at the moment though, for now we’re mainly just asking some very basic questions because we’re curious!

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