22/11/2016
A University of Bradford professor has won a Longitude Prize Discovery award in the hunt to maintain the effectiveness of antibiotics in the future.
The £10,000 award, to Professor Stephen Rimmer, is a stepping stone to further developing research work to compete for the Longitude Prize, a £10m prize fund that will reward a competitor who can develop a point–of–care diagnostic test that will conserve antibiotics for future generations and revolutionise the delivery of global healthcare.
In order to tackle growing levels of antimicrobial resistance, the challenge set for the Longitude Prize is to create a cost-effective, accurate, rapid and easy-to-use test for bacterial infections that will allow health professionals worldwide to administer the right antibiotics at the right time.
Professor Rimmer leads a research team focused on translating new technologies developed at the University of Bradford in the fight against antimicrobial resistance. Its work is primarily based around smart materials responsive to specific pathogens by changing state upon binding. These conformational changes are then either monitored to provide colourimetric readout of the presence of the pathogen or provide a basis for targeting antibiotics. The technology has the potential for simple and rapid measurement whilst maintaining high diagnostic sensitivity and specificity.
