Buckyballs make super-antibiotics

By at 6:47 am Friday, Apr 18

Buckyballs are being used to join multiple antibiotic molecules together, creating super-antibiotics.
Rice Chemistry Professor Lon Wilson decided to create a buckyball-vancomycin conjugate following years of work developing biochemical targeting mechanisms for buckyballs, spherical cages containing 60 carbon molecules. By linking antibodies to a buckyball with anticancer drugs attached to it, Wilson and two of his graduate students, Tatiana Zakharian and Jared Ashcroft, are creating targeted compounds that will bind only with certain cells, like those found in melanoma tumors, for example.

"Having the ability to target antibiotics to attack specific bacterial antigens opens the door for treatments that simply aren't available today," said Wilson. "For example, we believe it's feasible to create a C60-vancomycin conjugate that attaches to anthrax while it is still in the spore form."

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