"
Team:LMU-Munich/Project/Problem
From 2014.igem.org
Problem
Life-threatening pneumonia, deadly wound infections - what sounds like a scenario from the 19th century is turning into an increasingly realistic future, as the weapons we have at command to fight such diseases are getting blunt.
Infectious diseases are caused by microorganisms like bacteria or viruses and were mostly impossible to cure a hundred years ago. The discovery of penicillin in the late 1920s gave rise to a completely new class of medicines, so called antimicrobials, which allowed for the first time selective targeting of microorganisms, in case of antibiotics specifically bacteria. In the following decades, development of a wide range of antimicrobials enabled successful treatment of formerly life-threatening diseases and significantly increased global health and life expectancy.
However, fighting microorganisms has never been a completed task but rather an always ongoing race between drug development and pathogen evolution, a race in which microorganisms are more and more taking the lead. Resistance of bacteria against all known antibiotics are no longer gloomy visions of the future but already detected in some of the most widespread genera [1, 2]. The World Health Organization (WHO) even warns of a post-antibiotic era, in which common infections once again become deadly threats, if no efficient countermeasures are taken within the next years [3].
{{Template:Team:LMU-Munich/Playground/footer}}
