Great job!! I think research like yours is super important with the rise of bacterial infections and antibiotic resistance. In terms of a drug compound, would it be better for a compound to be bacteriostatic or bactericidal and why?
Thank you! This is a really great question because it is one I had at the beginning of the semester. It turns out that both are equally as effective. With bactericidal, you can really depend on the drug to kill all of the bacteria for you, and with bacteriostatic, the drug stops the growth and replication of the bacteria allowing your immune system to kill the remaining bacteria. So in both cases (for nonresistant bacteria) the infection will be eliminated.
I think the biggest finding/challenge in our experiment was that our compound was effective at a dose between 30-40uM. Because the safe dose is 10uM, it was a little discouraging to find that ours was much higher, but we decided to keeping going with some further experiments to find the exact effective dose, as well as to determine if Narcan is bacteriostatic or bactericidal.
Thank you! There are many phases of development and clinical trials that a compound has to go through in order to be put on the market as an approved and accessible drug, typically taking anywhere from 8 to 12 years, so it is a very long process!
Entered for L. Tharp: Narcan was identified as a hit during a previous semester and we thought it would be very interesting to dig deeper into it. We were already familiar with Narcan, and thought it was fascinating that a drug that’s really only used to treat opioid overdoses could potentially be used for killing bacteria as well! After doing some research online, we found the correlation between opioid receptors and immune cells, and decided it would be a great compound to test as immune cells are extremely relevant to our research.
curesymposium.org 
Great job!! I think research like yours is super important with the rise of bacterial infections and antibiotic resistance. In terms of a drug compound, would it be better for a compound to be bacteriostatic or bactericidal and why?
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Thank you! This is a really great question because it is one I had at the beginning of the semester. It turns out that both are equally as effective. With bactericidal, you can really depend on the drug to kill all of the bacteria for you, and with bacteriostatic, the drug stops the growth and replication of the bacteria allowing your immune system to kill the remaining bacteria. So in both cases (for nonresistant bacteria) the infection will be eliminated.
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What was the biggest finding/challenge in your experiments?
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I think the biggest finding/challenge in our experiment was that our compound was effective at a dose between 30-40uM. Because the safe dose is 10uM, it was a little discouraging to find that ours was much higher, but we decided to keeping going with some further experiments to find the exact effective dose, as well as to determine if Narcan is bacteriostatic or bactericidal.
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Great presentation! How long would it take for narcan to be accepted and used as an antibiotic?
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Thank you! There are many phases of development and clinical trials that a compound has to go through in order to be put on the market as an approved and accessible drug, typically taking anywhere from 8 to 12 years, so it is a very long process!
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Amazing presentation Lauryn! What lead your group to choosing on investigating Narcan?
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Entered for L. Tharp: Narcan was identified as a hit during a previous semester and we thought it would be very interesting to dig deeper into it. We were already familiar with Narcan, and thought it was fascinating that a drug that’s really only used to treat opioid overdoses could potentially be used for killing bacteria as well! After doing some research online, we found the correlation between opioid receptors and immune cells, and decided it would be a great compound to test as immune cells are extremely relevant to our research.
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Amazing presentation!!
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Thank you!!
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