Christopher Loose, 27 Beating up bacteria Problem: Each year, a
million Americans suffer infections related to medical devices
such as the intravenous lines that deliver chemotherapy and
liquid nutrition. Adding slow-release antibiotic coatings to the
devices helps prevent such infections, but the coatings become
inactive when all the drugs have been released, and bacteria can
become resistant to them. Solution: As a graduate student at
MIT, Christopher Loose created a design tool to optimize
formulations of naturally occurring antibiotics called
antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), and developed a way to use them
in medical devices. Found in bacteria, human sweat, and plants,
these short proteins puncture bacteria like balloons. The
mechanism is nonspecific, so microbes have trouble developing
resistance to the peptides. But AMPs are too expensive for
routine oral or intravenous use. So Loose incorporated optimized
peptides into coatings for medical devices, which are effective
with a small amount of peptide. When