Episode 51
Battling Bacteria - Community Microbe Champions!
We have a conversation including our first citizen scientist to kick of 2023. Lou Kellett is an active participant in the Liverpool School of Tropical medicine Swab and Send programme, which is striving to find the next breakthrough in bacteria to defeat antimicrobial resistance.
We also hear from Dr. Adam Roberts, the creator of the programme, and Dr. Amy McLeman, who is taking the bacteria that shows promising results, through to the next stage of investigation in the lab.
Swab and Send is an innovative programme that relies on the anticipation of citizens to infinitely broaden the search for a solution to the AMR problem.
Amy provides us with an insight:
“Antimicrobials can be produced by bacteria or fungus from anywhere; from the soil in your local park to your kitchen sink. These are just two of the places we are looking for the next new antibiotics and it works! We are finding microbes producing interesting antimicrobials that our team are working on characterising, but did you know it can take 10-15 years and over $1.7 billion to develop a new antibiotic from discovery to market. Even then once a new antibiotic is being sold the investment return is less than $50 million on average each year. Research and development costs massively outweigh the financial return”.
About our guests:
Dr. Adam Roberts – Reader, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine
Adam Roberts leads a research group investigating various aspects of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) from molecular biology and evolution of transferable AMR to genomic surveillance and antimicrobial drug discovery.
Dr. Amy McLeman - Postdoctoral Research Associate, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine
Amy works as a postdoctoral research associate on discovery and characterisation of novel antimicrobials from environmental isolates. Her work includes outreach to individuals and communities to communicate the importance of AMR and what Swab and Send is doing to tackle this, and to also encourage involvement of the public to take swabs of everything and anything and send them into us to look for the next antibiotic.
Lou Kellett – Active Citizen Scientists, Wales, UK
Lou has worked in local food and farming business for the last couple of decades, including organic farming. An active participant in many citizen science projects, Lou is particularly enthusiastic about the swab and send programme as it creates the opportunity for to share the unique local environmental habitats with the wider world. Lou finds being an active citizen scientist is a great way satiate a hungry sense of curiosity.
Relevant links:
https://www.lstmed.ac.uk/public-engagement/swab-send
https://www.facebook.com/swabandsend/
https://www.future-science.com/doi/10.2144/fsoa-2020-0053
#SwabAndSend
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Connecting Citizens to Science Podcast.
Kim Ozano:I'm Dr.
Kim Ozano:Kim Ozano.
Kim Ozano:This is a podcast about how communities and people join with researchers and scientists to
Kim Ozano:Please don't forget to like great share and subscribe so that we can continue to share voices from around the
Kim Ozano:We hope you enjoy.
Kim Ozano:Well, haven't I got a fantastic episode for you today?
Kim Ozano:It's the Swab and Send programme from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.
Kim Ozano:The idea of this is really to put citizens in the driving seat of identifying new bacteria to help in the fight
Kim Ozano:The idea behind the programme is that we, as the public, go out and collect samples of anything we think may be home to bacteria.
Kim Ozano:We swab that area, we put it in a little tube containing black agar and we send it off to the scientist at Liverpool School of
Kim Ozano:So let's go ahead and meet our guests.
Kim Ozano:Today we have Amy McLeman, who is a post-doc research associate at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine,
Kim Ozano:And we also have Adam Roberts, who is the real driving force behind this programme.
Kim Ozano:So Adam, welcome to our podcast.
Kim Ozano:Tell us the story of how this began and what it's all about.
Adam Roberts:Hello everybody.
Adam Roberts:Swab and Send came into my mind in about 2015 and I wanted to carry out a project which both engaged the public in
Adam Roberts:The main premise behind the Swab and Send project is that the antibiotics that we currently use to
Adam Roberts:The um, the rates of resistance in bacteria are increasing across the globe, and unfortunately, there's not a
Adam Roberts:One of the things that many people may not know is that the majority of the antibiotics that we use are naturally produced
Adam Roberts:Alexander Fleming was just very, very lucky when he noticed that one particular fungus on an agar plate
Adam Roberts:So there was this kind of zone of inhibition around the fungus.
Adam Roberts:It was pumping out this antibiotic, which was later called penicillin.
Adam Roberts:Um, and it was killing the staphylococcus bacterium that Alexander Fleming was working on.
Adam Roberts:That was the first time anybody noticed that the natural products, these antibiotics that we now use in medicine
Adam Roberts:And I thought why don't we look for other bacteria and fungi that can produce antibiotics?
Adam Roberts:We might find some novel ones.
Adam Roberts:Now, most of the antibiotics that we get at the moment are produced by bacteria and fungi from soil originally.
Adam Roberts:Soil is a really diverse community of bacteria and fungi.
Adam Roberts:You only have to look very easily and you will find bacteria that produce an antibiotic, but the unfortunate thing is
Adam Roberts:I thought that was a really key way to bring in citizens to decide exactly where we'd look for bacteria
Adam Roberts:It wasn't at the start, supposed to be something that would last years and years and years.
Adam Roberts:I just wanted to try it out.
Adam Roberts:Within the first two weeks, ITV News had got hold of it and it was on their website, and then it just went from strength
Adam Roberts:It continued to evolve as a project, both online and in the laboratory and I was really lucky to have, within
Adam Roberts:We started to find quite a lot of activity.
Adam Roberts:By activity, I mean we started to find quite a lot of microbes that produced antibiotics and killed
Adam Roberts:These are important clinical pathogens, so that enabled us to put all of this data on the website and say, "Hey look, this is working".
Adam Roberts:Then that snowballed and more people started to take part.
Adam Roberts:It appeared in the Atlantic Magazine over in the States, so we got a lot of interest from the USA.
Adam Roberts:Then I moved to LSTM in 2017 and the project came with me and LSTM really got behind it in a big way
Adam Roberts:People know about it, it's known within the community and we get repeat participants from various schools and
Adam Roberts:It's going really well and we've got lots of hits which have gone into the more traditional drug discovery science that we do.
Adam Roberts:It's a successful project that's started out small and has become a big thing, self-sustainable on its own, and it's really good fun.
Kim Ozano:It's really amazing.
Kim Ozano:It has astounded me what a journey you've been on personally and to see it grow so much.
Kim Ozano:It feels like a movement.
Kim Ozano:It's really different to other citizen science approaches.
Kim Ozano:It feels much bigger than just a science project.
Kim Ozano:Let's hear more from someone who's directly involved in it.
Kim Ozano:Lou Kellet, welcome to the podcast.
Kim Ozano:You are one of these fantastic citizen scientists that are engaged in this project.
Kim Ozano:Tell us why and how?
Lou Kellett:I think I came across it in the first place on, uh, Adam being interviewed on Radio four.
Lou Kellett:I was working on my friend's farm at the time, and I thought, that sounds interesting because we're more or less organic, we didn't
Lou Kellett:So I sent off for a set of swabs and thought I must have some things around here that other people won't have access to.
Lou Kellett:So I'll go and poke at those.
Kim Ozano:How do you decide what to poke at, I think was the term you used there?
Kim Ozano:How often do you do it?
Kim Ozano:Tell us a little bit more about that.
Lou Kellett:I guess I was thinking of what I've got access to that other people might not.
Lou Kellett:So, I was helping my boss to clear out the loft of the milking parlor and there was his great granddad's beekeeping hives in there.
Lou Kellett:I thought "that's unusual".
Lou Kellett:They haven't been touched since about the 1930s.
Lou Kellett:There might be something hanging around on there.
Lou Kellett:I did a local stone circle just because I thought the conspiracy theories would be funny if it
Lou Kellett:Just depends on seeing something and thinking, "oh, how about that"?
Kim Ozano:Amazing.
Kim Ozano:It really does sound like you look for unusual areas to swab.
Kim Ozano:We have Amy with us who is a scientist.
Kim Ozano:How does that fit in?
Kim Ozano:Amy?
Kim Ozano:Is that what you're looking for citizens to do?
Amy McLeman:Yeah, exactly.
Amy McLeman:So we're just looking for everyone to look at something they think is interesting and send us whatever it is.
Amy McLeman:We've had some really interesting things in; from older religious artifacts that have been lost and
Amy McLeman:It's just really cool to get things that are so different and that we personally don't have access to.
Adam Roberts:This is one of the important aspects of the project because we want to not
Adam Roberts:One of the best ways to almost randomise your sample collection is to ask the public, because they have such a collective
Adam Roberts:A project really relies on their imagination and simply being prepared if they see something, it could just
Adam Roberts:Just being able to be prepared and think, "actually that could be quite interesting", let's
Kim Ozano:Okay, that's, that's helping me understand more.
Kim Ozano:Lou, I understand that you've not connected directly with the scientists at Liverpool School
Kim Ozano:Do you have any questions?
Lou Kellett:I have loads of questions.
Kim Ozano:Fire away.
Lou Kellett:Okay, what actually happens to the swabs that we send, because I've had pictures back from Adam before of an
Adam Roberts:That's a great question, Lou.
Adam Roberts:What the team does in the lab when they receive the swabs is to streak them out onto an agar plate (that's just a, to run the swab over
Adam Roberts:And then we watch the colonies grow.
Adam Roberts:The colonies really represent individual bacterial cells from the swabs which are replicating.
Adam Roberts:In one little colony of bacteria on an agar plate, you may have 10 million cells and that's now enough for us to work on.
Adam Roberts:We will then take that colony and we will put that in what we call a microtiter plate.
Adam Roberts:This is essentially a plastic plate with 96 wells in it, all grided out.
Adam Roberts:Very, very tidy.
Adam Roberts:If you can imagine each one of those wells now has a little bit of liquid growth media for the bacteria and 96 individual
Adam Roberts:Now that agar plate has been pre inoculated with the pathogens, so the disease causing bacteria that we want to try and kill.
Adam Roberts:It could be MRSA for example, it could be E.coli and what happens now is that all of those 96 different bacteria are growing at
Adam Roberts:If any of those 96 different bacteria from the swab are producing an antibiotic themselves, that will diffuse into the
Adam Roberts:Okay?
Adam Roberts:So if one of the bacteria from one of your swabs produces this zone of inhibition, it means it's producing something which
Adam Roberts:We'll then take that and we'll put that in what we call our hit plate.
Adam Roberts:This is another plastic plate with 96 wells.
Adam Roberts:In that plate, there's only the ones that are active against our indicator strand.
Adam Roberts:That's what we then pass over to Amy to do the more traditional scientific investigations to allow us to try and determine
Amy McLeman:When I get the sample we've got an idea that they're active and that there's something in there that we want to research.
Amy McLeman:Then I try and separate out all the different things that the bacteria produced.
Amy McLeman:We've got a piece of equipment, it looks very fancy, it looks very technical, but all it does is it separates out all of
Amy McLeman:Then we can look at them more separated, see if the activity's still there, and we can start to look at what
Amy McLeman:So that's further along the line.
Adam Roberts:And that process can take up to 10 years.
Adam Roberts:If you're a pharmaceutical company, for example, with 200 people in the department looking at drug discovery, they may be able to screen
Adam Roberts:We're a little bit smaller scale than that so things take time after that initial microbiology work.
Adam Roberts:So some of the things that we're looking at, which are really exciting, we project would be in a
Lou Kellett:Wow.
Lou Kellett:Okay.
Lou Kellett:So if you've got something and it looks like it's gonna work, how do you go about getting more of it?
Lou Kellett:Like, do you synthesise what the person's swabbed?
Lou Kellett:If it's something you can't go back and swab again?
Adam Roberts:Great question.
Adam Roberts:So, you know the original 96 well plate that I talked about, where we've got all of the bacteria, so we also store those in the freezer.
Adam Roberts:We can always go back to the original bacteria, so we don't need to revisit the site.
Adam Roberts:Currently, we have almost 60,000 different types of environmental bacteria, and that's one of the largest libraries of environmental
Adam Roberts:That's a really valuable resource with which we could screen endlessly with different things.
Lou Kellett:How much freezer space does that take up?
Adam Roberts:Quite a lot!
Adam Roberts:Our freezers are about the size of a car.
Lou Kellett:Okay.
Adam Roberts:You imagine a car on its end that's the size of a normal minus 80 degree freezer but just going back to
Adam Roberts:We can get gram scale amounts if the synthesis pathway is relatively easy and not too expensive.
Adam Roberts:Then we can do all kinds of toxicology studies on it, looking for emergence of resistance in different pathogens.
Adam Roberts:At that point, we no longer actually need the original producing bacteria.
Adam Roberts:We've really separated ourselves from the swab and then the bacteria itself, so we've just got this little pot
Kim Ozano:I have a question just leading on from that, Adam, in terms of communication back to citizens who have taken their
Adam Roberts:I wanted to use a platform that was free because we had no resources for it and also
Adam Roberts:It's a really effective way to archive all of the data that we've produced.
Adam Roberts:If you go onto the Facebook Swab and Send page, you can see all the way back to the inception of the project
Adam Roberts:We get variable amounts of hits on the various posts, so if we get samples from a particular school, we'll see that everybody
Adam Roberts:That's really great because you know it's having a good penetration into that particular audience.
Adam Roberts:In addition to the results that we generate from the swabs, we also put things on Facebook, which are just
Adam Roberts:I think it was the new year of 2018, or it might have been 2016, I just put a quote from Alexander Fleming on the warning he gave in his
Adam Roberts:That went viral and that reached over a million individuals and that really cemented Swab and Send as
Adam Roberts:I would say Facebook is our best platform for reporting the results, but Twitter is a lot better for publicising
Adam Roberts:There's a kind of a different audience on those two platforms.
Kim Ozano:This is a really great example and at the Connecting Citizens to Science Podcast, we talk a lot about communication and
Kim Ozano:So it's really great that you have found that and quite innovative as well in terms of generating activities.
Kim Ozano:I think that's really useful for our listeners to understand.
Kim Ozano:Amy, I guess you're quite removed from the citizen aspect in the laboratory.
Kim Ozano:Do you have any questions for Lou?
Amy McLeman:I do get to do some outreach, which is, it's quite fun, but difficult for me to know why some people are a little bit hesitant
Amy McLeman:It would be nice to know what made you want to join in and maybe what made you a little bit hesitant if you were hesitant, or if
Lou Kellett:I just like taking part in, in sciencey projects really.
Lou Kellett:I'm not at all a scientist.
Lou Kellett:I work in food and farming, but I just like the idea of being part of it and the premise that the more people you got involved, then
Kim Ozano:Wonderful.
Kim Ozano:Adam, I think what we would like to understand is what are some of the barriers that you've come across through the many years you've
Adam Roberts:So longevity of a project such as this is important.
Adam Roberts:It's really unlikely to be a success, both in terms of public engagement and in terms of finding any new
Adam Roberts:You have to plan for that longevity.
Adam Roberts:What was fundamentally important was the institutional support, because then we could make it mainstream.
Adam Roberts:That's institutional support is both in terms of publicity and support for the landing page at LSTM, there was a pledging site
Adam Roberts:I would advise people to think about it at an early stage otherwise you can get into all kinds of bureaucratic difficulties
Adam Roberts:Um, the other thing that I would say is it's really important to have an enthusiastic team.
Adam Roberts:I came up with the project, I acknowledge that, but I haven't done all the work.
Adam Roberts:The work has been done by my team over the years and fantastic current team that we have, and they've really embraced it.
Adam Roberts:It's really shown dividends as well, because recently we wrote it into a large grant application and that was subsequently funded.
Adam Roberts:That transition from what you could call a hobby to a core component of your daily work is really important because, it's
Kim Ozano:Great.
Kim Ozano:Thank you very much.
Kim Ozano:Amy, you were a postdoc, so you did your PhD in your postdoc on this project.
Kim Ozano:How does this fit in terms of your career within, well, health systems more widely really?
Amy McLeman:I've come from quite a diverse study background actually.
Amy McLeman:I've done conservation, I've done plant pathology.
Amy McLeman:My PhD was on pesticide drug discovery.
Amy McLeman:I've done some AMR, antimicrobial resistance, work before.
Amy McLeman:For me, it's a really important subject and it's got a lot of lifespan in terms of career plans.
Amy McLeman:It's an interesting project, like I think.
Amy McLeman:Lou, if I was not a scientist, I would be like you, joining in these public science things because I just find it interesting.
Amy McLeman:It's really nice to be in the project and actually working on it and seeing these swabs come in and all the samples.
Amy McLeman:Drug discovery and looking for new solutions to antimicrobial resistance is where I want to be.
Kim Ozano:Wonderful.
Kim Ozano:Thanks very much.
Kim Ozano:Adam, you said in six years time, we might see results here.
Kim Ozano:What is the overall aspiration here in terms of the gold standard of what could be achieved?
Adam Roberts:There are two, two aspirations from the project.
Adam Roberts:One is to increase awareness and subsequent stewardship of the antibiotics that we currently have.
Adam Roberts:People are only going to look after them if they realise how important they are to our society, not just in the healthcare
Adam Roberts:Also, there is a possibility that we may find something which is potentially a new antibiotic.
Adam Roberts:Now that is a needle in a haystack in a field full of haystacks, and there's no way to change that.
Adam Roberts:But if we don't look, we'll never find, and success doesn't depend entirely on finding the next new penicillin.
Adam Roberts:What we could find is a novel molecule which affects a new drug target in a bacterial cell, because not only do we need new
Adam Roberts:If we found something that affected a new target in or on a bacteria, we could then screen all of the different
Adam Roberts:That may open up a whole new field and a whole new class of antibiotics.
Adam Roberts:So each of those incremental steps, increasing our knowledge is important.
Adam Roberts:It's very unlikely there'll just be a huge leap and we'll find a medicine ready molecule.
Adam Roberts:Quite often what we'll find is something which works, but doesn't work very well, but then our medicinal chemists
Adam Roberts:This is what takes years and years.
Adam Roberts:So we come up with a derivative of that original molecule, which works better, only targets bacteria, and is able to
Adam Roberts:Success is an increase in knowledge in any one of those fields really.
Kim Ozano:That really helps me to understand the scope of work that has gone into this to reach those end goals.
Kim Ozano:Lou, you are a citizen scientist.
Kim Ozano:What piece of advice would you give to others who want to be involved in projects like this?
Lou Kellett:Just go for it.
Lou Kellett:It might be slightly intimidating in the first place if you're swabbing something in public and people give you funny
Kim Ozano:It sounds like you really enjoy it and are an asset, so we're glad to have you here.
Kim Ozano:Amy, advice for others in your position.
Amy McLeman:One of the challenges, and I've spoken to other people in community science projects, is getting
Amy McLeman:Adam's very good at the social media.
Amy McLeman:I do a lot more of the in-person things, so at conferences I've asked everyone to take a swab of their shoes while they're there.
Amy McLeman:I've got quite a big family, so I've got all of them involved and they're over the country.
Amy McLeman:It's just getting as many people involved as you can and being quite open to talk about it and take questions about it.
Amy McLeman:Talking to other people in citizen science projects to get ideas of how they're doing outreach is one of the best ways to get started.
Kim Ozano:A real sense of community there.
Kim Ozano:I love that.
Kim Ozano:Adam, final piece of advice and, and anything you want our listeners to take home from this conversation?
Adam Roberts:I would say two things.
Adam Roberts:I'd say if you are thinking of starting your own citizen science, don't be fearful of the consequences of failure.
Adam Roberts:Even if it lasts for a month or two, it's probably gonna be useful for somebody.
Adam Roberts:Just run them enthusiastically and put the work in and make it work for as long as they're tenable.
Adam Roberts:Secondly, what I would say is to potential participants, echo what Lou says.
Adam Roberts:Have a go.
Adam Roberts:You know, you never know.
Adam Roberts:It's such a random project that you might be the lucky one that finds something.
Kim Ozano:Key message there, have a go, and I think I'm taking that home at a personal level already.
Kim Ozano:I'm getting out there and swabbing and sending the minute I finished this recording.
Kim Ozano:So thank you so much to all of our guests.
Kim Ozano:I've really enjoyed the conversation.
Kim Ozano:Thank you for our listeners do like rate, share and subscribe so that we can get messages like this out to everyone so that people and
