The Art of Antibiotics
Two residencies. Two artists. Two labs.
The Art of Antibiotics
Two residencies. Two artists. Two labs.
Copyright © 2018 Biofaction KG
Publisher: Biofaction KG
Research and Science Communication
Kundmanngasse 39/12
1030 Vienna
www.biofaction.com
office@biofaction.com
Title page image credit: Sarah Craske
Contributors (in order of publication): Markus Schmidt, Lei Pei, Sarah Craske, Sven Panke, Steven Schmitt, Irene Wüthrich, Eduardo Miranda, David Peterhoff
Design: Birgit Schmidt
Editing: Sandra Youssef
Publishing House: myMorawa von Morawa Lesezirkel GmbH
ISBN 978-3-99057-991-6 (Paperback Edition)
ISBN 978-3-99057-992-3 (Hardcover Edition)
ISBN 978-3-99057-993-0 (e-Book Edition)
First Edition, June 2018
Cite as: Schmidt M. (Ed.) 2018. “The Art of Antibiotics”. Vienna: myMorawa.
Rights:
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in whole or in part, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Two residencies. Two artists. Two labs.
Initiated and produced by Biofaction
With financial support by the European Commission FP7 Project SYNPEPTIDE (613981)
Image: Sarah Craske
Image: Camillo Meinhart
The SYNPEPTIDE Art Residency
This booklet documents the artist in residency program we organized within the EC FP7 funded project SYNPEPTIDE. The aim of the project was to design and test novel types of peptide antibiotics. In recent years it has become all the more clear that we are entering a post-antibiotic age, where hitherto useful medicines against bacterial infections are losing their strength due to the build-up of antibiotic resistance in bacteria.
The global answers to the threat of resistant bacterial infectious diseases are manifold and range from better diagnostics, across alternative forms of treatment (such as phage therapy) to altered forms of industrial agriculture (especially in relation to livestock) - to name just a few.
The search for and development of novel antibiotic molecules, however, must remain a high priority, especially since the well-established large pharmaceutical companies no longer seem interested in the development of novel antibiotics, as the return on investment expected in such a venture is viewed as unprofitable. This situation, which has been described as a pharmaceutical “market failure”, is a wake-up call for governments everywhere and clearly highlights the importance of publicly funded research and innovation.
Given the magnitude of our need for novel antibiotics, it is no exaggeration to state that a successful search for novel medicines will save the lives of thousands, if not millions, in the future. We see SYNPEPTIDE as an investment by the public hand into the future of public health.
While the precise scientific undertaking to understand, design, synthesize and test large amounts of combinatorial lantibiotics requires highly specialized knowledge and skill sets and seems very academic and abstract, the real world ramifications of this research are tangible, concrete and have a direct impact on society. This ambiguity between the abstract challenges in the quest for novel drugs and the tangible societal implications make the SYNPEPTIDE project a prime candidate for an intervention from the field of art.
For that reason, we issued a call for artists to submit their CVs, portfolios and a letter of motivation to explain why they would like to take up a residency in one of the SYNPEPTIDE labs. Within a few weeks, we received 78 applications from all over the world representing highly diverse artistic backgrounds. Our short list of 8 artists featured individuals who we felt were well equipped to carry out their work within a laboratory environment and in collaboration with scientists. These 8 artists had already had some exposure to the natural sciences and work in the lab, but, moreover, they demonstrated their ability to take up inspiration from science and to transform it into their art.
After a series of interviews and consultations with the respective laboratories, we finally invited “artist without category” Sarah Craske (UK) to carry out her residency in Switzerland at the ETHZ Basel, in Sven Panke’s Bioprocess laboratory, and composer/programmer Eduardo Miranda (Brazil and UK) to spend his residency in Germany at the University of Regensburg, in Ralf Wagner’s group.
In discussions with the artists and scientists we highlighted the importance of not merely viewing the residency as a form of pedagogical variation of science communication, but rather as an opportunity to allow an unhindered exchange between art and science, between them personally, in the hope that the antibiotic research would in one way or another find its way into future artworks.
We were aware that a residency of 4-6 weeks in the respective labs might not be sufficient for the artists to produce a completely new piece of art, but we were confident that the selected artists would continue their work after the residency to eventually be able to show an artwork at a later stage.
It goes without saying that the artists were free to choose their own approach and topic, while our function at Biofaction was to offer support and feedback whenever necessary and needed. Each artist was also supported with a lump sum (to cover travel costs, materials and artist fees) of 7.000 Euros. However, the real opportunity for the artists (and scientists of course) was, without a doubt, the chance to interact in the lab, to learn from each other, and to reflect on the ramifications of the research from an artistic point of view.
The two artists are currently in the process of organising exhibitions and/or opportunities to premiere their work. For updates please check our website at:
www.biofaction.com/portfolio/synpeptide-art-residency
In this booklet, we offer an introduction to the problem of antibiotics resistance in pathogenic bacteria and the SYNPEPTIDE strategy to overcome that, using modularity and combinatorics of peptide antibiotics. Sarah Craske and Eduardo Miranda then offer an insight into their work by describing their experience with the residencies and the pathways towards their artwork. Finally, the involved scientists report their experience with the artists spending time in their lab.
We hope that the readers will be intellectually, emotionally and aesthetically stimulated by the contents of this booklet.
In case you would like to get back to us with any kind of feedback, please do so at: art-science@biofaction.com
Introduction
Antibiotics are one of the most successful medicines that have saved many lives and contribute significantly to the control of infectious diseases. The modern antibiotic era is usually associated with the discovery of syphilis treatment drugs by Paul Ehrlich on the one hand, who developed approaches to screen chemical compounds in order to find one that could cure syphilis in 1909, and on the other hand the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming in 1928, who developed approaches to screen antibacterial compounds from other microorganisms (Aminov 2010). Until today, these two types of approaches continue as the main strategies in the research and development of novel antibiotics, which have led to obtaining antibiotics currently available in the market and have contributed greatly to improving public health all over the world. However, due to the limitations of the antibiotics themselves, the misuse of the drugs, as well as the emergence of resistance factors in bacteria, novel approaches are needed in order to find new antibiotics to control antibioticresistant bacterial pathogens, as shown in Figure 1 (Brown and Wright 2016).
Figure 1. Historical and future anti-bacterial drug discovery approaches (Adapted from Brown and Wright 2016)
With the advent of antibiotics as well as other preventative approaches (such as hygienic practices, vaccines etc.), bacterial infections and related diseases became much less of a health problem. In contrast to the pre-antibiotic era over a 100 years ago, infectious diseases are not the leading cause of death in the developed world (see Figure 2) (Armstrong et al. 1999). Combining the amount of lives saved and the offspring of these “antibiotic” survivors, it is fair to say that a large part of the world’s population today lives because of antibiotics.
Figure 2. Mortality rates for all causes (in grey), noninfectious causes (in blue), and infectious diseases (in pink) in the USA since 1900. The spike around 1918 was caused by the Spanish Flu.
(Source: Armstrong et al. 1999)
Antibiotics are only effective against bacteria (but not viruses) and can be classified based on their mechanisms of actions, that is the way the antibiotic molecule interferes with the bacteria to stop its growth or inactivate/kill it (see Figure 3).
Figure 3. Different antibiotics use different biochemical targets and mechanisms to attack bacterial cells (a schematic bacterial cell is shown here). Some antibiotics inhibit the synthesis of the cell wall, others block the synthesis of the DNA etc. (Source: Brown 2015)
Antibiotic Resistance