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Well Nottingham has two big strengths in research that might not seem very allied at first.
We are very well known for our molecular microbiology and we're also very well known for our early
medieval history, Anglo-Saxon and Viking history, and our rather unusual research project has
brought these two strands together to look at early medieval anti-infection remedies.
At the moment there is a big danger that we are losing the ability to fight infection
with antibiotics and of course I come from a period where there were no anti-biotics.
I’m an Anglo Saxonist and I work with Vikings. We chose this recipe in Bald’s Leechbook
because it contains ingredients such as garlic that are currently investigated by other researchers
on their potential anti-biotic effectiveness and so we looked at a recipe that was fairly
straightforward. It’s also a recipe we’re told is the best of leechdoms , so how can
you not test that, so we were curious.
So Christina worked to translate the recipe and there were several things we really needed
to think carefully about. So there were a couple of words for instance that were ambiguous
and we had to think about what ingredient was meant by those words
[Speaking from the recipe] Cropleac that is a type of Allium and garleac which is modern English
garlic begea emfela both of the same amount gecnuwe wel tosomne pound them well together.
We re-constructed the recipe as faithfully as we could and this, you know Bald gives
very precise instructions for the ratios of different ingredients and for the way they
should be combined and stored before use so we tried to follow that as closely as we could.
There are certain things that they say in the recipe that you can, you can like use,
for example, like the recipe was left to stand for nine days and used to strain it through
a cloth to actually, I guess, to remove all the particulates in it. But things like, it
has part of the recipe is ox gall, from a cow’s stomach so, although we don't know
for definite, we've tried our very best to replicate as we could. And the wine that's
contained in the recipe, Freya managed to source from a vineyard that we know used to
be there from the ninth century so we've tried our very best to try and replicate it as well
as we can.
We then tested the recipe by growing established biofilms so sticky multicellular blobs of
Staphylococcus aureus in a synthetic model that mimics soft tissue infection and we simply
grew these bacteria, added the recipe to them like a topical ointment, left it for 24 hours
and then just recovered the cells and counted how many bacteria were still alive and what
we found was very interesting.
We found that Bald’s Eye Salve is incredibly potent as an anti-staphylococcal antibiotic
in this context. We were going from you know a mature established population of a few billion
cells all stuck together in this highly protected biofilm coat to really just a few thousand
cells left alive, so this is a massive, massive killing ability.
Biofilms are highly resistant to antibiotics, so this is one of the problems that we deal
with on a daily basis in hospitals is bugs from biofilm infections. So we figured that
although a medicine killed staphylococcus in a test-tube we weren't very hopeful that
it would work in biofilms and yet again we found that it, it really worked and killed
all the cells in a biofilm. And then we, then we asked a collaborator of ours in the states
to, if they would test this in an in vivo wound model and basically the big surprise
was that it seems to be more effective than conventional antibiotic treatment.
So how it works is still an open question and this is something we’re now moving on
to look at and we've got a couple different ideas. You know it might be that there are
several active compounds in in the full mixture and that what the full medicine does is it
attacks the bacterial cells on several different fronts at once. It makes it very hard for
them to resist the attack. So they could resist
one form of damage on its own but not three together.
It’s also possible that when you combine these ingredients and leave them to steep
and the recipe uses alcohol which is a solvent that can extract molecules and concentrate
them and it has to be left to stand for several days according to the recipe so it's possible
that there’s some chemical reactions going on in that mixture as it's left to stand.
We might actually be taking precursor molecules from the ingredients and creating a novel
molecule that has this very potent effect. At the moment we don't know, we would very
much like to find out and we're working very hard to do that.
It is absolutely phenomenal. For me in particular this is very interesting. I have been interested
in the rational Middle Ages for a very long time. The Middle Ages are often seen as the
dark ages. We use the term medieval these days, it’s often used in the media as pejorative
and I just wanted to do something that explains to me how people in the Middle Ages looked
at science or some scientific experiments from a medieval context so for me this is
a fantastic opportunity.
I still can’t quite believe how well this one thousand-year-old anti biotic actually
seems to be working. When we got the first results we were just utterly dumbfounded,
we did not see this coming at all. When we then made another batch of the medicine and
tested that - had a couple of sleepless nights thinking you know what are the plates going
to look like in the morning? And seeing that we can repeatedly make this, we've made four
independent batches using different fresh ingredients each time and it's worked each
time. Also, we've tested the medicine, sort of again and again as it's been left just
standing in bottles in the fridge being stored and it retains that activity for a very long
period of time. So I think that the, obviously you can never say with utter certainty because
this work’s in the lab it's going to work as an antibiotic, but the potential of this
to take on to the next stage and say yeah really does it work as an antibiotic is, is
just beyond my wildest dreams to be honest.
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