Research that's Changing the World
Bryan Davies has contributed discoveries to the pressing issue of antibiotic resistance, a worldwide threat to human health. He has led work to harness peptides and small proteins—tiny but powerful biological molecules—to treat drug-resistant bacterial infections. His research has identified promising antibiotic candidates and developed new ways to precisely deliver these molecules where they’re needed in the body.
What Starts Here
As a professor in the Department of Molecular Biosciences, Davies holds the Lorene Morrow Kelley Professorship in Microbiology. He serves on the NIH Drug Discovery and Molecular Pharmacology review panel, acts as a consultant for healthcare and agriculture biotechnology companies and co-founded an antibiotic start-up company. His research has led to technologies and reagents now licensed by five private companies, highlighting both their scientific value and real-world potential as these partnerships help turn his discoveries into practical solutions. Additionally, Davies helped produce the critically acclaimed documentary film "Stumped" about one man's survival of a deadly bacterial infection and the growing perils of antibiotic resistance.
Beyond the Forty Acres
Emily Mallick, Ph.D. Invaio, Director, Project Management Office: "His work has the potential to help industry accelerate the leap to nature-positive agriculture, solve challenging problems like Citrus greening (also known as Huanglongbing or HLB), a devastating bacterial disease for which there is no current solution.... Techniques pioneered in Dr. Davies' lab such as Surface Localized Antimicrobial Display (SLAY), can be utilized to screen upwards of a million diverse peptides at once to identify effective candidates to fight HLB."
