Gea Cereghetti (ETHZ 2024)

The discovery of antibiotics was pivotal in medical history, providing humanity with a powerful defense against bacterial infections.

However, this advantage is now threatened by the global rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. These resilient pathogens are undoing decades of medical progress, reviving deadly diseases, and jeopardizing treatments like surgery or chemotherapy. By 2050, antibiotic resistance is predicted to cause more deaths than cancer, claiming 10 million lives and costing $100 trillion per year. For this reason, the World Health Organization considers antibiotic resistance one of the major threats to public health today and calls for immediate action to secure the future of medicine and public health.

The “MicroResist” project aims to address this crisis by developing new technologies to solve two fundamental problems: the need for personalized antibiotic treatments and the lack of new antibiotics. By combining cutting-edge microfluidics with personalized medicine and drug discovery, we aim to develop devices that will help doctors choose the best antibiotic type and dosage for each patient and allow scientists to rapidly develop and test radically new classes of antibiotics.

These innovations will accelerate antibiotic discovery and make personalized treatments a reality, bringing us closer to overcoming antibiotic resistance.