Project financed by UEFISCDI: PN III Program - Tinere Echipe de Cercetare

 

Project Type : Research Projects for Stimulating Creation of Young Research Teams

Project Code:  PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2016-0032

Contract No.:  99/02.05.2018

Project Time Span: 02.10.2018 — 30.04.2020

 

Principal Investigator: Dr.  Lorant Janosi

 

Project Abstract:

Antimicrobial peptides are a type of host defense peptides that present both high therapeutic potential and high selectivity of interaction with bacterial cells over mammalian cells. However, the possibility of bacterial resistance occurring against natural AMPs activity, combined with the already picked low-hanging fruits of obvious natural peptide targets, suggests the need for novel AMP design approaches. The main challenge is increasing efficacy of the novel drugs in safety conditions, since previous individual design methods had only limited success thus far.
The main objective of this application is the development of a new approach on identifying potential novel antimicrobial drugs. The ground-breaking nature of the proposed approach is that it combines the predicting power of several complementary computer-aided design methods with experimental validation of the proposed AMPs. We will computationally design new AMPs whose purpose would be to disrupt or pass through membrane models, and experimentally validate their efficiency against several bacterial strains. This new approach, can, in principle, be applied to find novel AMPs and rank them by their computationally predicted relative antimicrobial activity and cytotoxicity.