The marriage of two innovative technologies—one developed by Northeastern’s Slava Epstein, the other by the Broad Institute’s Paul Blainey—could accelerate both the discovery of new antibiotics that kill pathogens without encountering resistance and the diagnosis of specific pathogens causing disease, enabling fast, targeted treatments.
The new system, described in a paper in the journal Nature Communications, speaks to the Obama administration’s recent release of a National Action Plan to Combat Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria that calls for nationwide tracking of antibiotic resistance in pathogens using DNA sequencing.
