Targeting ABC Transporters to Tackle Antimicrobial Resistance
As seen in BioTechniques

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the most urgent problems facing medicine today. Finding new ways to fight drug-resistant bacteria is a scientific challenge — it’s a race against time. So where do we look for new targets?

Professor Heather Pinkett of Northwestern University thinks the answer might lie in a family of proteins that bacteria use to survive: ABC transporters. As President of The Protein Society and keynote speaker at ELRIG Drug Discovery 2025, Heather is using some of the most advanced structural biology techniques available to understand how these proteins work — and how they might be used against the very bacteria that carry them.

In this interview with BioTechniques, she explains why ABC transporters are such an attractive target for new antibiotics, what it actually takes to study membrane proteins in the lab, and why she believes machine learning could change the way we design drugs around resistance rather than just reacting to it. Her vision for the future of AMR drug discovery is ambitious — and the science behind it is fascinating.