Current Project and Members
Meet the 2023 Team!
We are a team of 10 students from a wide variety of majors and backgrounds that worked to develop NiSkin, a topical cellulitis treatment that can pass through skin barriers to deliver antibiotics to the site of infection in the dermis.
Our Project Abstract
Annually, over 14 million cellulitis cases occur in the United States, totaling over $3.7 billion in ambulatory costs. Cellulitis is a common skin infection that occurs in the dermis. Oral and intravenous antibiotics are the standard treatment, because the upper skin layers serve as formidable barriers, rendering it difficult for topical treatments to reach the dermis. Instead, antibiotics travel through the circulatory system, leading to unfavorable interactions with the body’s microbiome, causing patient discomfort and promoting antibiotic resistance. Therefore, we designed a topical treatment, NiSkin, that would traverse skin boundaries and specifically destroy the pathogens causing cellulitis. NiSkin combines the powerful lantibiotic nisin A and skin-penetrating peptide TD-1. NiSkin minimizes side effects and antibiotic resistance through selective activation at the infection site. We successfully co-expressed the nisin precursor conjugated to TD-1 alongside two enzymes that produce active nisin. We observed interactions between the precursor and the enzymes through Western blot.
Read More About Niskin on Our Wiki