Antibiotics are used to control infections with pathogenic bacteria. Excessive utilization of non-degradable antibiotics by human patients or in farm animals might lead to accumulation in the water compartment and subsequently to the promotion of resistance development when wide areas containing relevant bacteria have sufficient concentrations of active antibiotics leading to a constant selection pressure on the bacteria. Therefore, it would be attractive and an important contribution to sustainable pharmacy to develop a new generation of biodegradable antibiotics, which would rapidly disintegrate in sewage treatment plants.

Modern computational methods from the field of chemoinformatics on the one hand allow a better assessment of the potential risks of the entries of active pharmaceutical ingredients and products formed from them. On the other hand, this knowledge can be used for the development of new drugs to reduce the risks associated with the entry of these substances into the environment. In the ideal case, therefore, the integration of environment considerations leads to an improvement of the drugs. Such new drugs can also present a new business case.

At the Institute for Sustainable Chemistry and Environmental Chemistry at the University of Lüneburg “greener”and more sustainable variants of antibiotics are developed to subsequently reduce the risk due to antibiotics for the water quality in the project funded by the DBU (30839) by improving their biodegradability in the environment and / or to avoid the toxicity of non-degradable metabolites and breakdown products. Computer models are applied for estimating structural properties of the molecules (QSAR: Quantitative structure-activity relationships) and to simulate the binding to the target structure of the pharmaceutical (docking methods) as well as experimental testing. This approach allows a categorization of existing substances under environmental aspects and will lead to new antibiotic candidates that still bind to the target structure and which can be biologically inactivated in the environment and degraded into harmless fragments.

Project Operation:

Prof. Dr. Klaus Kümmerer
und Dr. Christoph Leder
Institut für Nachhaltige Chemie und Umweltchemie
Leuphana Universität Lüneburg
Scharnhorststraße 1 C13.217
D-21335 Lüneburg
04131-677-2893/-2872

Ref. 30839