IBM’s Ninjas do battle with bugs

Over a billion people are affected by fungal infections every year, ranging in severity from topical skin conditions like athlete’s foot to life-threatening fungal blood infections. The infection is more likely to occur when the body’s immune system is compromised due to an illness like HIV/AIDS, cancer or when receiving antibiotic treatment.

There is a pressing need to develop efficient and disease-specific antifungal agents to mitigate this growing drug resistance problem. Traditional antifungal therapeutics need to get inside the cell to attack the infection but have trouble targeting and penetrating the fungi membrane wall. And since fungi are metabolically similar to mammalian cells, existing drugs can also have trouble differentiating between healthy and infected cells.

A potential new solution has now emerged from the most unlikely of origins – research in California by computer giant IBM into new ways of etching the silicon wafers employed in its semi-conductors.

This work led to the identification of new kinds of polymers that produce an electrostatic charge when chained together and the researchers realised that the ability to control the movement and electronic charge of the materials at an atomic level could have far wider applications.

Consequently, IBM launched its own nanomedicine programme and teamed up with the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) in Singapore to explore ways these charged polymer structures could be used.

Now IBM is launching a new range of products branded Ninja Polymers it says will change how drug-resistant superbugs are tackled.

An organic catalytic process has been developed to turn waste PET plastic into entirely new molecules that can be transformed into effective antifungal agents.