Gilles van Wezel receives ERC Advanced grant to awaken sleeping antibiotics

The ERC Advanced grant is awarded to Gilles van Wezel, Professor of Molecular Biotechnology of the Institute Biology Leiden (IBL) of Leiden University. With the 2.5 million euro grant of the European Research Council, he will focus on unravelling the systems that control the production of antibiotics in the bacteria Streptomyces.

Bacteria are increasingly resistant to existing antibiotics, while fewer new antibiotics are developed. Van Wezel now will use a new approach to find natural products in Streptomyces, from which antibiotics are developed. ‘I want to add a new dimension to the exploration, so we can look for new medicine more accurately’, says Van Wezel.

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