NTNU researchers produce new antibiotics from marine bioprospecting

Licensing opportunity

Scientists at NTNU and SINTEF have discovered eleven species of bacteria that generate compounds that kill cancer cells and three other bacteria that produce novel antibiotics.

This is the first time Norwegian scientists have carried out the entire process from gathering bacteria from the fjords to purifying active compounds in the lab.

The NTNU and SINTEF researchers have been bioprospecting for five or six years, but the pace has accelerated in the past few months, since Stein Ove Døskeland’s group at the University of Bergen joined in the research, one of the most highly-regarded groups in this field.

Many of the bacteria that have been brought up from the Trondheim Fjord have antibiotic activity, but most of these are already known, “Substances with a new chemical structure and, we hope, with a different mechanism of action than we already know of, could be extremely valuable,” said NTNU professor Sergey Zotchev.

The 11 anti-cancer substances have been tested against leukemias and stomach, colon and prostate cancer cell lines. The scientists have identified the chemical structure of one of the three antibiotics, and shown that it is active against multi-drug resistant bacteria.