Kyle Allison, an award–winning Boston University graduate student, said he believes bacteria are “far more complicated [than] we tend to give them credit for.”
With this in mind, Allison, a School of Engineering graduate student, said he developed a modified form of sugar that helps kill resistant bacteria, winning first place for his creation in the Collegiate Inventors Competition on Nov. 15.
Allison, who has worked at BU’s Center for Biodynamics, said he had been working on the modified sugar for years. After first demonstrating the invention a couple of years ago, he said he spent the past two years exploring its applications.
The invention involved a “combination therapy” that applies particular metabolites and antibiotics to kill persistent bacteria, according to the competition’s website.
“I came to the idea of improving existing antibiotics against persistent bacteria after a failing to wake them up,” Allison said. “Failing to wake them up led me to seek an alternate approach to killing these bacteria.”
Mark Brynildsen, a colleague who worked with Allison, said they met daily to discuss results and what experiments to perform next as well as address the technical issues they encountered each week.
“Challenges for this project were mainly technical, and they occurred on a weekly basis,” he said. “None of them come to mind as [show stoppers]. Overall, the most challenging part of the project was to reconstruct the underlying mechanism.”
Allison was selected to compete as a finalist, alongside graduate students from Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California, Los Angeles and Johns Hopkins University, according to the Collegiate Inventors Competition website.
Allison flew to Washington on Nov. 14, he said, to present his invention to a group of judges. He focused more on the purpose of his research than on winning the competition, he said.
“With some helpful words from my adviser, I put winning out of my mind, focusing instead on communicating my work as best as I could and enjoying myself,” Allison said.
Professor James Collins, a co-director of the Center for Biodynamics and Allison’s adviser, called the student’s success a sign of his “inventiveness” in the bioengineering field.
“His inventive approach to eradicating persistent bacterial infections has the potential to immediately enhance the treatment of infectious diseases in industrialized countries, as well as the developing world,” Collins said.
Brynildsen said that next steps will depend on a series of animal studies and clinical trials.
“The next step is to identify . . . how many pathogens can this technique work for and what metabolites are needed to produce the effect,” Brynildsen said. “Right now we have shown that it works for two pathogens, and that the metabolites that work in these different species differ dramatically.”
Allison said he has no definite details about the future of his product at this stage. He said he is certain, however, that he aims to commercialize the product and to develop it into treatment methods.
“I am excited, as it works well and isn’t finalized yet,” Allison said. “We are still developing it and hope to have an impact on multiple types of chronic bacterial infections.”
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