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.
