Antibiotics and antibiotic resistance

Published on July 31, 2024   40 min

A selection of talks on Infectious Diseases

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0:00
Hello. My name is Dr. Martin Goldberg. I'm a lecturer in Clinical Microbiology at Birmingham City University One of my great passions is about antibiotics and antibiotic resistance and the development of new antimicrobial compounds. So, what today's talk will be about is first of all giving you an understanding of the basics of what antibiotics are, how they work, and then looking onto problems of antibiotic resistance.
0:38
So, I'll talk about the basic types of antimicrobial agents. I'll give you a little bit of history. I'm going to then talk about the semantics to how it is that compounds are chosen for therapeutic use and how clinicians decide which compounds are going to be the most effective depending on the types of infection. I'll then give you a very brief overview on resistance mechanisms, mechanisms for the spread of antibiotic resistance, looking at the consequences of resistance to antimicrobial compounds, and then finally, an outlook on the future in terms of antibiotic resistance and drug discovery.
1:20
So, there's a few references here one or two a little bit elderly, but nevertheless contain a few important pieces of information that you will find useful.
1:31
First of all, what do we mean by antimicrobial agents? These are compounds that inhibit the growth and/or replication of microorganisms. A simple definition and there are basically two types of compounds you can get. There are bacteriocidal agents which kill microorganisms and there are bacteriostatic or static agents which rather than killing the microorganism simply prevent their growth, but if the compound is removed or becomes more dilute, then growth can recommence. So, I'm going to give you a little introduction