| February 27, 2008 MIT student wins Lemelson award for work on infections
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(NECN) - Timothy Lu is weeks away from his PhD, working towards his MD, and in his spare time, the MIT graduate student has come up with a way to help antibiotics wipe out bacteria.
Lu: "We're not actually developing antibiotics or drugs. We're actually using viruses to only infect bacteria not human cells. And we modify those viruses, we modify their DNA, so they become much better at killing bacteria."
Lu has won the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize which rewards students for their inventiveness. The 27-year-old's innovation could have a range of applications from killing an E. Coli outbreak on spinach to annihilating the so-called super bug MRSA.
MRSA, for example, is traditionally found in hospitals, but has been cropping up in the community more and more -- in day care centers and schools. It is drug resistant, meaning most antibiotics can't kill it. The bug infects tens of thousands and kills more people each year than AIDS. That's about 19,000 people in the U.S. alone.
Drug companies don't spend a lot of time developing antibiotics. Experts say that's largely because people only take them for a short period of time and they're not very profitable. One major research center estimates the cost of developing a new drug at upwards of $900 million.
Lu, who will get $30,000 in prize money, says he hopes to have an application ready for industrial use within five years. A process for humans will take longer, but Lu is nothing if not determined.
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