Antimicrobial resistance — or AMR — is a global health crisis driven by bacteria, fungi and other microbes that have evolved new ways to resist the medicines that once killed them.
This means that once-treatable infections are quietly becoming incurable. It also means that procedures that leave people vulnerable to infection — like C-sections, organ transplants, minor surgeries, dental work and chemotherapy — may eventually become too risky to perform.
“Antibiotics and other antimicrobial medicines quite literally uphold the entirety of modern medical practice,” says Jon Stokes, an assistant professor in McMaster’s Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences.
“That’s not hyperbole — if we lose our ability to reliably control infection, the modern medical procedures that we currently take for granted will be impossible to perform, our health-care systems will become overwhelmed, and our quality of life will decrease dramatically.”
But none of this needs to happen, Stokes adds. He and many other researchers at McMaster are working tirelessly to ensure that it doesn’t.
Through collaborative, transdisciplinary studies at the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research, McMaster scientists are racing to deliver urgently needed solutions to the existential health crisis.
Here, in recognition of World AMR Awareness Week (WAAW), is a sampling of some of McMaster’s AMR-related research achievements from 2025.
Researcher Gerry Wright, left, and postdoctoral fellow Manoj Jangra, holding a 3D-printed model of lariocidin, the new antibiotic that they discovered together. (Photo by Georgia Kirkos, McMaster University)
New class of antibiotics discovered in Hamilton backyard
A team led by researcher Gerry Wright discovered an all-new class of antibiotics that targets some of the most drug-resistant bacteria on the planet. The new molecule, called lariocidin, is produced by soil-dwelling bacteria collected from a Hamilton backyard.
It attacks bacteria in a way that differs from all other drugs, and is also not toxic to human cells, not susceptible to existing mechanisms of antibiotic resistance, and it works extremely well in an animal model of infection, making it a strong clinical candidate. Wright’s lab is now working on optimizing the new antibiotic for clinical development.
AI harnessed to understand how a newly discovered antibiotic works
McMaster researchers, led by Stokes, recently made two scientific breakthroughs at once: They not only discovered a brand-new antibiotic that targets inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), but also used a new type of AI to successfully predict how their new drug works.
Enterololin, the new antibiotic, is a “narrow-spectrum” drug, meaning it attacks only a specific group of disease-causing bugs — in this case, a family of bacteria which includes E. coli. This means it not only kills E. coli, but also reduces the opportunity for drug-resistant strains of the bacteria to colonize the gut in the first place — a major driver of Crohn’s disease.
As such, the new drug is a promising treatment candidate for the millions of patients currently living with IBD. The research team used AI to understand how the drug works in just 100 seconds, and validated the AI prediction in the lab over a six-month period. Without AI, this process typically takes up to two years and costs millions.
PhD student Megan Tu, left, and Professor Eric Brown found a way to make deadly drug-resistant bacteria vulnerable to a commonly used antibiotic.
Teaching old drugs new tricks
McMaster researchers, led by Eric Brown, discovered a new way to make bacteria susceptible to antibiotics — including those they once resisted.
By depriving certain bacteria of zinc, the research team triggered important physiological changes that rendered bacteria increasingly vulnerable to an important class of drugs called carbapenems.
To understand the phenomenon, the researchers suggest picturing the bacteria as a knight holding a sword in one hand and a shield in the other. Deprived of critical nutrients, like zinc, the knight loses the strength it needs to hold both sword and shield, and must lay down its shield to hold its sword in both hands — “it’s still very deadly, but now its defences are down,” Brown says.
The findings may help extend the life of our current arsenal of antimicrobial drugs.
The fungal pathogen Candida albicans under attack by a new drug candidate discovered at McMaster University.
New antifungal drug candidate found in McMaster greenhouse
Wright’s research team also discovered a new drug class that could someday lead to breakthrough treatments for dangerous, drug-resistant fungal infections. The new molecules, dubbed coniotins, were isolated from a plant-dwelling fungus found in the McMaster Biology Greenhouse, located on the university’s campus.
Coniotins exhibit potent activity against otherwise drug-resistant Candida auris, which sits atop the World Health Organization’s list of priority fungal pathogens.
A McMaster research team, led by graduate student Jake Colautti, left, and associate professor John Whitney, right, has discovered new proteins that kill a broad array of bacteria.
Discovery of antibiotic-like proteins that kill a broad range of bacteria
Researchers at McMaster, led by John Whitney, discovered how a widespread but previously mysterious group of antibacterial proteins work — a finding that could someday reshape how we treat bacterial infections. The proteins were shown to kill a broad range of different bacteria, including Listeria, Staphylococcus and Enterococcus. Until now, no known antibacterial protein has targeted bacteria from multiple groups like this.
The research team also found that the proteins function in a completely new way, striking from a distance instead of through prolonged bacteria-bacteria contact. Whitney believes the new findings expand our understanding of how bacteria wage war and may ultimately inspire new approaches to tackling AMR.
ESKAPE Model creators Jon Stokes, left, and Autumn Arnold are putting it in scientists’ hands now so they can use the tool to do in a moment what otherwise might take weeks, with the goal of accelerating the discovery of new drugs at no extra cost.
McMaster-developed AI tool fast-tracks global drug discovery efforts
Researchers in Stokes’ lab recently developed the ESKAPE Model, a new AI tool designed to identify new antibiotics in the blink of an eye. The new model, which was released publicly and is free to use, screens user-submitted chemistry for molecules that may have therapeutic potential against ESKAPE pathogens, a globally recognized list of the world’s most dangerous and drug-resistant bacteria.
Using machine learning, the tool is allowing researchers from all over the world to rapidly assess their own chemical sets for important new drug candidates. The research team says ESKAPE Model users can screen upwards of 20,000 chemicals in the average workday without ever picking up a pipette or spending a dollar — both fast-tracking and lowering the cost of drug discovery research.
Postdoctoral fellow Matthew Zambri (left) and McMaster professor Marie Elliot (right) have observed a never-before-seen bacterial growth behaviour.
New bacterial growth behaviour discovered at McMaster
In a study led by Marie Elliot, McMaster researchers found that some bacteria can grow in multiple different ways. The findings fundamentally challenge the conventional understanding that bacteria grow and multiply using only a single type of growth mechanism.
The never-before-seen behaviour has important implications for how we approach the treatment of bacterial infections, Elliot says: Multiple growth mechanisms means multiple targets to attack with antibiotics.