As a follow up to the current state of antibiotic development in the world, there's a crowdfunded/kickstart project creating take home kits to help identify new antibiotics.
Josiah Zayner, a new synthetic biology fellow at NASA, and Mark Opal, a neurobiologist and drug development specialist, have created the Iliad Project to try crowdsourcing as a means of identifying research possibilities.
Currently the CDC estimates that 2 million people in the United States become infected with bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics every year and that more than 23,000 die.
Are citizen scientists the answer? With the large pharmaceutical companies claiming that there's no profit to be made from antibiotics with research and development costs so high, we can hope so.
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