Artificial virus created to help fight against superbugs

An artificial virus capable of attacking superbug infections resistant to antibiotics has been bioengineered by researchers at UCL, NPL, University of Cambridge, University of Exeter and King's College London. The rise of superbugs is a serious concern in the medical community as bacteria evolve to evade existing treatments faster than new antibiotics can be developed. Rather than seeking out antibiotics that exist in nature, as has been the case with previous advances, the team of experts have designed one from the group up, inspired by viruses. The findings, reported in ACS Nano, demonstrate how bioengineering and multi-modal measurements can offer and validate innovative solutions to healthcare, building on natural disease-fighting capabilities. Maxim Ryadnov, Area Science Leader at NPL said: "Viruses are geometric objects. They are like solid cages built from tiny blocks glued together with an atomistic precision. We take that shape, strip off their viral proteins, and are left with a template." To pursue such a feat, this interdisciplinary research team adopted the geometric principles of the virus architecture to engineer a synthetic biologic - protein -capsid - which assembles from a small molecular motif found in human cells.