Imagine one day you come down with a simple infection, and the antibiotic prescribed by your doctor stops working. While this may sound like a far-fetched scenario, it is a reality that is becoming increasingly common around the world.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of people lose their lives to infections that were once easily treatable. This is because bacteria have become strong enough to resist the drugs we know. So what does it take to win this race? We need to develop new weapons. But to do that, we first need to understand the enemy from the inside.
That's exactly what Dr. Merve Yüce, Professor Dr. Fethiye Aylin Sungur, and Professor Dr. Özge Kürkçüoğlu from Istanbul Technical University (ITÜ) are doing. All three are women, all three are Turkish, and all three are from ITÜ. And the study they published this April marks a world first in this field.
In fact, the prestigious American journal Biochemistry, where the study was published, selected this article as the cover story for its special issue on "The Chemistry and Biology of Peptides."
The battle against antibiotic resistance will be won not by a single miracle drug, but through cumulative discoveries. This team is contributing to that body of knowledge both from the drawing board and the laboratory bench. And they're doing it from Istanbul, from ITÜ.
