• Question: If you only had the ability to discover a new treatment or research on a topic of your choice what would it be and why?

    Asked by yawn42cup to Sudhin, Sergio, Katie, Frances, Diarmuid, Aoife on 12 Nov 2019. This question was also asked by made42cup.
    • Photo: Aoife Campbell

      Aoife Campbell answered on 12 Nov 2019:

      If I could chose any area to treat then I would work on sleep research. Bad sleep is linking to EVERY disease possible (heart attacks, strokes, Alzheimers, depression, anxiety etc). If there was some way to fix an individuals sleep then I think it would have a huge impact on health. Sleeping tablets don’t put us into a natural sleep so this kind of sleep doesn’t really count (and they’re pretty bad for us!)

    • Photo: Katie Fala

      Katie Fala answered on 12 Nov 2019:

      Reversing antimicrobial resistance – at present we are facing a crisis in antimicrobial resistance where more and more bacteria are resistant to more and more antibiotics. This is especially worrying for the many bacteria that can share the genes for the resistance with their neighbours as it accelerates the phenomenon of resistance and is not known to be reversible.

      This year a research group in the UK showed that it might be possible to use genome-editing tools like CRISPR-Cas to basically cut out the resistance genes from antibiotic-resistant bacteria – if this were shown to be feasible and practical on a large scale then it would be revolutionary.

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