Post/Biotics – Your personal science lab in a box to participate in finding new antibiotics

Introducing post/biotics toolkit™

A citizen-science platform and 'lab in a box' toolkit providing the equipment, knowledge and science network everybody needs to support researchers in new antibiotic development.

Collect

Gather interesting samples from your surroundings: soil, fungus, roots, herbs, insects all have shown antibiotic properties.

Test

Use Post/Biotics Toolkit™ to check if the sample has any antibiotic property. Test takes 24-48 hours and result will be visible as coloured ring on the petri-dish.

Record

Upload the information of the sample: location, species & experiment results on the Post/Biotics App™

Validate

Share your results with community using the Post/Biotics App. Prove efficiency of your samples & experiments by multiple TEST – RECORD cycles.

Collaborate

Samples with potential antibiotic properties are sent to Post/Biotics University Partners for further studies. Scientists perform advanced assay tests on your samples to identify if they can make a novel medicine.

Publish

Become part of leading research, discoveries identified using Post/Biotics is credited to everybody. You can help make new discoveries & contribute to scientific research papers.

Have other interesting ideas on what can you sample? Tell us more about it!

WHY PARTICIPATE?

Antibiotic Resistance is a growing issue of massive concern to our healthcare system

We cannot expect a few scientists to solve our problems, we need everybody.

The use of antibiotics has enabled us to cure many diseases. However, current excessive usage, in particular the continued prescription of antibiotics to treat viral diseases to promote faster growth of animals in food production, increases the resistance of pathogenic microbes, resulting in a loss of efficacy of antibiotics. This poses an urgent threat to global public health and increases the cost of healthcare. WHO has declared antibiotic resistance as global health care crisis and has warned that if immediate action is not taken we shall soon be pushed back to pre-antibiotic era where simple infections and operations could be life-threatening.

The task of finding new antibiotics is both labor and resource intensive. Most antibiotics known to us today have been developed out of natural extracts – soil, plants, insects, deep-sea beds and volcanoes, all of which host useful microbes with antibiotic potential. What if the world's next antibiotic was in our own backyard? Most known antibiotics are developed from natural extracts, so a new antibiotic could potentially be found anywhere.

ABOUT 90% of sore throats
are caused by virus and prescription of antibiotics is unnecessary
30 YEARS SINCE LAST ANTIBIOTIC WAS FOUND
and each year we have yet another class of antibiotic that is not effective anymore
25K people DIE
of antibiotic resistance in Europe every year and these numbers are growing rapidly
50% of antibiotics prescribed
are unnecessary or are not optimally effective as prescribed

TEAM

Post/Biotics was initiated by designer Vidhi Mehta as part of her thesis project for Innovation Design Engineering at Royal College of Art & Imperial College London(2015). The idea behind Post/Biotics is a vision of open-source drug discovery, it imagines what can happen when design enables the tools of scientific innovation to reach out to the common people, supporting their learning, and adding to scientific knowledge through the power of the crowd.