Troy Lister: The Bug Battler

Abstract

As a boy in Australia, Troy Lister always liked building things—intricate model airplanes or complex electronic circuits—and knew he’d end up working with his hands. Today, his tinkering might be on the microscopic scale, but its impact is definitely bigger. Lister is trying to construct molecules that could stop our worst bacterial nightmare. In the past 50 years, only two new classes of antibiotics have made it onto the market—every other “novel” microbe killer has come from tweaking older molecules. So swiftly are bacteria outwitting us that, in 2014, the World Health Organization warned we were on the verge of a post-antibiotic world. Lister is trying to prevent that nightmare scenario in a rather unconventional way. As head of chemistry at the tiny Cambridge, Mass.-based start-up Spero Therapeutics, Lister isn’t designing compounds that directly kill bacteria. Instead, Spero’s molecules weaken bacterial defenses so that infections are less aggressive and older ...