The last time we caught up with Josiah Zayner, he was busy devising a musical instrument that produces melodies based on the reactions of plant proteins to light. Now Zayner, a biophysicist and incoming synthetic biology fellow at NASA, has set his sights on a project with the potential for greater public impact: one that aims to rapidly accelerate the discovery of new antibiotic compounds.
Along with Mark Opal, a neurobiologist specializing in drug development, Zayner has launched The International Laboratory for the Identification of New Drugs (or "The ILIAD Project"). The idea behind ILIAD is remarkably simple: instead of relying on research institutions and pharmaceutical companies to come up with new antibiotics, ask citizen scientists to do it instead by having them test specimens like plants and insects for antibiotic properties. Indeed, heaps of conventional antibiotics owe their existence to nature: penicillin is derived from fungi, and a promising drug devised from the Chinese plant red sage is currently in clinical trials.
"When Josiah first told me about this idea, I thought it was bullshit, because I know how hard drug development is," Opal says. "But [looking to nature] is one main way antibiotics have been discovered in the past, and I really think that crowdsourcing has the potential to give us big advantages."