Severe sepsis and septic shock have a mortality rate of 20-40% in the setting of optimal resuscitation in wealthy countries and are responsible for the loss of millions of health dollars and tens of thousands of lives every year. Antibiotic intervention remains one of the most powerful and cost-effective interventions in medicine, but is under severe threat from antibiotic resistance. The poor economics for antibiotic development by pharmaceutical companies, coupled with difficulties in identifying new drug targets has limited the development of novel therapies for bacterial infections.
The Bioplatforms Australia Antibiotic Resistant Pathogens Framework Data Initiative is a collaborative effort with key Australian universities, research institutes and Bioplatforms facilities to find common targets for therapeutic intervention among sepsis-causing pathogens. The consortium took on the challenging task of producing and integrating multi-omics datasets generated from key clinical sepsis pathogens from Australia and globally.
Cholesterol acquisition was observed across all pathogens as a response to the host immune system. Pathogen specific observations include changes in carbohydrate, organic acid and protein. Collectively these results suggest possible new pathways for targeting sepsis infection, thus reducing the reliance on antimicrobials. It is anticipated this rich data resource will be mined by researchers to support discovery and translational research in tackling the global challenge in the rise of antimicrobial resistance. This dataset will also be a useful resource for establishing new bioinformatics pipelines to help further multi-omics research in understanding complex biological systems.
The key partners in this initiative include Bioplatforms Australia (enabled by NCRIS), the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, Charles Perkins Centre, Australian Infectious Diseases Research Centre, Institute for Molecular Bioscience, Bio21 Molecular Science and Biotechnology Institute, Centre for Infectious Diseases and Microbiology / Westmead Institute, Australian Institute for Microbiology and Infection, Centre to Impact AMR and Infection Program, Monash University, Centre for Clinical Research, Melbourne Bioinformatics, the Children’s Medical Research Institute (Bioinformatics Group), Sanger Institute and University of California.
Bioplatforms facilities who are partners in this collaborative effort include Ramaciotti Centre for Genomics, Australian Genome Research Facility (AGRF), Monash Proteomics and Metabolomics Facility (MPMF), Australian Proteome Analysis Facility (APAF) and Metabolomics Australia (MA), Bio21 Institute.
The open access resource from the initiative is now available from Nature Communications
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