Dean of Graduate Studies Terri Camesano recently attended the ESCMID 2025 meeting in Vienna, Austria, to present her paper, “Mechanisms of antimicrobial peptide and antibiotic interactions on membrane permeabilization and deactivation of Escherichia coli,” with co-authors (and WPI alumni) Nicholas Watkins and Wenxu Han. The focus of the paper was how antimicrobial peptides can be used to rescue the activity of traditional antibiotics towards bacteria that have been resistant to such treatments. Antimicrobial peptides, such as the human-derived cathelicidin, LL37, weakened bacterial membranes and allowed them to be susceptible to traditional antibiotics again.
ESCMID represents the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases. At the ESCMID Global 2025 conference in Vienna, Austria, held April 11-15, 2025, a total of over 7,800 abstract submissions were received from more than 129 countries.