Exploration of East African Medicinal Herbs in the Search for Novel Antibacterial Agents

Antimicrobial resistance has become a major threat to human health and development. As our currently used antibiotics lose efficiency, we risk rapidly increasing number of untreatable infections leading to an increased number of lethal cases, longer hospital stays, and related suffering and economic burden. Antibiotic resistance is expected to hit developing countries especially hard, with 90% of the lethal infections predicted to happen in Africa and Asia.This study aims to make use of East African indigenous knowledge to use natural resources in finding new ways to control bacterial infections. Following an ethnomedical survey, medicinal plants will be collected in Kenya and Tanzania. Their constituents will be isolated, and identified by NMR and MS analyses. The bioactivity and toxicity of the isolated constituents will be determined using bacterial and cell-based assays. The biochemical pathways targeted by the most promising bioactive substances will be identified by chemical genomics. Advanced NMR techniques will subsequently be used to identify the binding mode of the substances to their protein targets to support their development into drugs.Besides achieving high scientific goals, the project aims the multidisciplinary training of East African PhD students. It will support the economic development of East Africa by strategic knowledge transfer and by promoting patient safety on the use of plants as a result of the scientific investigation of ethnomedical practices.