Great presentation! You tested a lot of different concentrations, so good job there! Do you know if your compound is in any approved drugs for other diseases you mentioned?
To my knowledge, ellagic acid is in very early stages in terms of any sort of therapeutic development. It isn’t uncommon for a lot of these drugs to also have potential to treat cancers, but all I have seen concerning this particular chemical is early data on antibacterial applications.
Good job giving all that information really clearly without much stumbling at all and in condensed way so that it would fir close to a 5 minute time line. Is elegiac acid currently a common alternative to antibiotics in pharmaceutical companies today or is it more up and coming?
I don’t believe ellagic acid is present in any current antibiotics. To the best of my knowledge, it is one of many compounds that have been acknowledged to have some form of antibiotic activity via a bulk screen, making it difficult to single out during follow up work. As such, it hasn’t really been developed beyond this kind of preliminary assay.
Great presentation. Could you think of any way to have less bacterial death with lower concentrations? Or do you expect it to always have the same result regardless of concentration?
That’s a very interesting question and a somewhat difficult one to answer – I think my short version is that I do expect that there is some concentration that ellagic acid will lose effect. In terms of manually modulating the activity, there is quite a bit that could be done with medicinal chemistry. For example, it is relatively easy to imagine changing a functional group to reduce the compound’s ability to permeate cell walls. By tuning the drug’s ability to reach the associated target in this way, it should be fairly achievable to engineer lower activities.
There are quite a few ways that the drug could lose effectiveness and it varies based on what the actual mechanism of action is. By changing the exterior solvent (eg. reducing the amount of DMSO or adding a different solvent such as ethanol), it might be possible that the drug becomes solvated more effectively and is less easily taken in by cells. Similarly, it might also be possible to alter the physical structure of the compound such that it binds the target molecule more poorly, is more easily transported out of the cell, or has a more difficult time getting into the cell originally.
Fantastic presentation! Do you think that Ellagic acid has the potential to be applied to more than just salmonella in terms of antibiotic resistant infection?
Potentially. Our original sources suggest that it is effective against other types of gram negative bacteria, so it is very likely that it has general activity outside of Salmonella. It is harder to predict with gram positive bacteria as the antibiotics that are effective against one type are not necessarily functional in other cases, but I would still guess yes.
Great presentation! You tested a lot of different concentrations, so good job there! Do you know if your compound is in any approved drugs for other diseases you mentioned?
To my knowledge, ellagic acid is in very early stages in terms of any sort of therapeutic development. It isn’t uncommon for a lot of these drugs to also have potential to treat cancers, but all I have seen concerning this particular chemical is early data on antibacterial applications.
Good job giving all that information really clearly without much stumbling at all and in condensed way so that it would fir close to a 5 minute time line. Is elegiac acid currently a common alternative to antibiotics in pharmaceutical companies today or is it more up and coming?
I don’t believe ellagic acid is present in any current antibiotics. To the best of my knowledge, it is one of many compounds that have been acknowledged to have some form of antibiotic activity via a bulk screen, making it difficult to single out during follow up work. As such, it hasn’t really been developed beyond this kind of preliminary assay.
Great presentation. Could you think of any way to have less bacterial death with lower concentrations? Or do you expect it to always have the same result regardless of concentration?
That’s a very interesting question and a somewhat difficult one to answer – I think my short version is that I do expect that there is some concentration that ellagic acid will lose effect. In terms of manually modulating the activity, there is quite a bit that could be done with medicinal chemistry. For example, it is relatively easy to imagine changing a functional group to reduce the compound’s ability to permeate cell walls. By tuning the drug’s ability to reach the associated target in this way, it should be fairly achievable to engineer lower activities.
What types of conditions might inhibit the effectiveness of Ellagic acid?
There are quite a few ways that the drug could lose effectiveness and it varies based on what the actual mechanism of action is. By changing the exterior solvent (eg. reducing the amount of DMSO or adding a different solvent such as ethanol), it might be possible that the drug becomes solvated more effectively and is less easily taken in by cells. Similarly, it might also be possible to alter the physical structure of the compound such that it binds the target molecule more poorly, is more easily transported out of the cell, or has a more difficult time getting into the cell originally.
Fantastic presentation! Do you think that Ellagic acid has the potential to be applied to more than just salmonella in terms of antibiotic resistant infection?
Potentially. Our original sources suggest that it is effective against other types of gram negative bacteria, so it is very likely that it has general activity outside of Salmonella. It is harder to predict with gram positive bacteria as the antibiotics that are effective against one type are not necessarily functional in other cases, but I would still guess yes.