Question: Do you think you are close to finding a drug to cure a disease

Katie Fala answered on 19 Nov 2019:

I am hopeful; we’ve identified a panel of about 100 bacteria that seem to be effective at stopping other ‘bad’ bacteria from talking to eachother (hence undermining their efforts to persist and cause disease, in theory). The next part of my work involves purifying the compounds that they are producing, determining the structure and figuring out how they work. This process will probably whittle them down to a smaller number, but I am still optimistic that there might be something very interesting in there to come out. Time will tell, it will also be important to assess how this new drug could actually act in the body, many years of clinical trials will be needed.