Transcriber: Arvind Patil
In 1941, a police officer was injured during an airstrike.
In World War Two, he got a deep cut on his face and got
a nasty bacterial infection.
He later developed sepsis,
which means the blood in his body was teeming with bacteria.
The doctor did all he could. They even take one eye out just to prolong his life.
Unfortunately, he didn't make it.
In 2016, an old lady came back from a trip.
She broke a leg and she developed a nasty bone infection in her right leg
and the hip thing again. The doctor did article,
but they couldn't save him so far. All right.
So these two cases, the two patients. They both died from bacterial infections.
But the reason behind it, could it be more different?
See that police officer. His name is Albert Alexander.
He's the first patient to receive penicillin.
And penicillin works wonderfully. He's showing great sign of recovery.
Unfortunately, back then, penicillin was produced using a fungus. Right.
They had to grow the fungus using graft, glass vessels like this.
And the production value was
so low that they need hundreds to thousands of these vessels just to
produce enough penicillin for one dose.
When there's no more penicillin that to start the treatment.
And just ten days later, his conditions relapsed. Now the pass away.
Well, fast forward 75 years.
You would think that surely or surely with all the antibodies that we have,
we should be able to treat a bacteria infection. Right.
Right. Well, unfortunately for her case,
she developed she was infected with a pen, drug resistant bacteria,
which means none of the antibiotics was working.
Right. And to be exact, none of the 26 antibiotics that
the doctors throw at her was responding. There was really nothing they can do.
It's very sad.
Shortly after Albert passed away.
For the next 3 to 4 years, there was a great progress in penicillin production.
You know, the big pharma companies jump in and remodel production.
They invent new fermentation technology. All right.
So by 1945, it was available for everyone.
In fact, penicillin played an important role during World War Two.
It's estimated that penicillin save thousands of life.
Towards the end of the war. What? You.
And people are celebrating penicillin like it's a wonder drug. Just love it.
Right. And in fact, for the next 20 years,
it's known as the golden era of antibiotics,
where most of our antibiotics that we're using currently are being discovered
due to a short time. And life is good. Using it. Using it everywhere.
Even even to not to treat bacteria.
Right?
Yeah. Because people are so comfortable using antibiotics. Right.
So half of the prescription antibiotic prescription was to a viral infection.
You know, when you have a flu, you don't need antibiotics.
But in some countries, there's to prescribe antibiotics anyway. Right.
So that's a mix, miss prescription misuse of antibiotics.
Well, it's still 80% in some countries of the antibiotics.
So we'll fall livestock farming as to the animal.
There are chicken tail cattle, 80% .
This is upsetting.
And that, you know, antibiotics are antibiotic resistance.
They do come in hand in hand. Resistance will occur naturally.
But doing it this way, we just accelerate the entire process.
So here's the timeline of antibiotics and antibiotic resistance.
You know, even before the first clinical trial of the first,
you were first human patient.
Receive penicillin, know the resistance against penicillin has been reported
even one year before.
Methicillin once it's introduced.
Two years later, we have methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus,
or better known as Mersa, and remains one of
the most deadly multidrug resistant bacteria that still haunts
the doctors to this day.
With vancomycin, a very potent antibiotics.
And just 16 years later, we got vancomycin resistance at the caucus.
The same case for linezolid, except just one year later,
we observe resistance against it. So we are currently in this tug of war.
We've been in this type of war.
No, I introduce new antibiotics and bacteria,
develop resistance against it. I would just introduce a new one.
However, for the past two decades, a few decades or so,
we have been losing this war.
Antibiotics has gotten so expensive, takes much longer to develop.
And the pharma companies are not doing it anymore. It is not moneymaking enough.
Whereas what bacteria only have no problem developing resistance?
Do you know that bacteria doubled themself in 30 minutes?
You start from one cell and 24 hours later.
Do you know how many cells they are?
There's 1,000,000,000,001,000 trillion cells.
Just one day, I imagine all combinations they can do.
They can try out the resistance against it.
So bacteria's always, always been this case.
But if we don't introduce antibiotics fast enough, we're going to lose.
And we are losing. We are losing is losing this war.
This is some numbers to show how bad the situation is currently.
It's estimated that up to 700,000 people die every year.
That was the study done in 2014, 2016. Right.
And there was a paper land,
that paper published this year that estimated that in 2019,
more than 1.2 million people died directly due to AMA infection.
And going at this rate is projected, but by 2050,
that number will balloon to 10 million, 10 million deaths every year.
So your thing that oh I hope about antimicrobial resistance by those few
with I don't see it around me. So what does it matter right
now without effective antibiotics? Modern day medicine will not be possible.
You can't do your surgery safely.
Sorry. You can't do your surgery safely.
Organ transplant, the heart bypass, the C-section.
Everything would be super risky.
And you know that. For chemotherapy, for effective chemotherapy,
you need to go with antibiotics as well,
because the immune system is weak and the antibodies to fight off
the infection.
Even small injuries like a cut.
You know, you get infected without antibiotics, it might lead to amputation.
And common cases like strep throat can be life threatening.
Ear infections can get into your brain and leave permanent damage.
So it's really serious.
So what do. What can we do about it? What do we do about it?
Luckily, the government and policymakers in Singapore and all around
the world have recognised this and they sought to put resources,
expertise and time into it. Right.
So here at Singapore Mighty Airlines and Research and Technology,
we have a program that's specifically set up just to tackle this problem. Right.
So we do surveillance. You know, we go into our site,
collect wastewater in the sewage, collect back to the lab,
and then we test for the presence of anti bacteria, antibiotics, resistance.
So why is it important to detect the presence of decisions like
for football? One is that it tells us how bad the AMR situation is at
a community level. Right. And it gives a very crucial feedback mechanism to
the government how they can better tweak their policies.
Those are decisions they can pass around.
They get the bacterias can pass this general. Right.
It's like a breeding breeding spot for them to just see
whether they can make the best antibiotics
and antibiotic resistance bacteria.
And we the one that we also do diagnostics now with,
we develop a test kit that can distinguish between a virus infection
and a bacterial infection that can dramatically reduce
the mis prescription of antibiotics. We also do therapeutics.
My research group Focus on therapeutics.
We do hydrogel screening, which means we take millions of compounds to of
the bacteria and see which one works.
We can also trawl protein based agents and polymers and do it.
But today I would like to focus one that I think has a potential the Sophia Emma.
And I was thinking to myself, I was brainstorming for ways to tackle Emma.
I was thinking, what's the natural enemy of bacteria? Right.
So this is bacteriophages.
So this is a highly specialized virus that does nothing,
but it's bacteria over lunch. Right. So its sole purpose is to kill bacteria.
That's great. And in fact, even in Singapore and all around the world,
people are studying bacteriophages.
Then go one step deeper. US.
What if we can take the weapon that the bacteriophage uses to kill
the bacteria and just take that weapon alone and cure the bacteria? Right.
That weapon is like that. Right.
So it's the enzyme, a protein that can digest all of the cell wall of
the bacteria. So what we do is that we take this protein,
take it out from the bacteriophages and they produce in the lab,
and then we troll it through the bacteria.
So it works really quickly.
It pokes it punctures. It pops the bacteria like a balloon.
Right. In fact, it's so it feels really slow.
Of course, really quickly, we can have a tube of bacteria like food,
billions of bacteria, just a few drops of lysine. Shake it.
That hub it solution that takes solution in 10 to 20 minutes time maybe will
become clear. Is that for us? Right. I think that is also highly selective.
You know, they are good bacteria and they are bad bacteria.
We do want to kill all the bacteria.
We only want to cure the bacteria that, you know, do us harm.
And lighting can do just that. Right.
And because lysine can target bacteria really quickly and it targets
a highly conserved area of the bacteria,
the bacteria finds it very difficult to develop resistance against it.
So in the lab we do have license to target Mercer,
target vancomycin resistance at Wilcox.
We also have license to target capsular pneumoniae,
which is a very pen resistance bacteria that infected the old lady.
So we have that solution, but it's not perfect yet. We do need time.
And every time it's something that we do not have.
So we need everyone to play our part to slow down Emma,
to buy us time to develop new antibiotics
and new antibacterial agents like license to tackle asthma. You can do your part.
You can finish your antibiotic prescription.
You can do not ask for antibiotics.
If you caught a flu, you can actually you don't buy meat
as being grown by antibiotics. Every little bit counts.
But we have to do it right now.
Trust me, we're not ready for a world without effective antibiotics. Thank you.