In the 17th century, drug hunters ventured deep into jungles in search of exotic plants with medicinal properties, but the 70 percent of Earth covered by water was off limits (Jacques Cousteau didn’t invent the aqua lung until 1943). From Iceland to Vietnam, Dr. Brian Murphy scuba dives to the depths of global lakes and oceans, fusing in modern technology to discover the next generation of antibiotic drugs. View Halo Profile >>
Tell us about your research…
The focus of my research program is to discover antibiotics from bacteria collected in lakes and oceans. We have created an innovative platform which fuses classic microbiology with chemistry and computer programming to accomplish this, resulting in a discovery process that is more efficient.
How could it someday impact patient lives?
Since resistance to antibiotic therapies is a major threat to human health worldwide, our program fills an urgent public health need by enabling researchers to fill the drug development pipeline with new antibiotic leads.
