Life at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
In September 2016, a Nevada woman died of a bacterial infection. The woman, in her 70s, had been hospitalized previously in India due to a fracture of her right leg, which led to bone infections and more subsequent hospitalizations. During these infections, she almost certainly received antibiotics to help her recover, especially given that in […]
Some oft-prescribed antibiotics, including penicillin and cephalosporin, share a common motif in their chemical structure: a small group of atoms arranged in a ring, called a β-lactam. These β-lactam antibiotics utilize this unusual structure to disrupt the cell wall synthesis in bacteria, greatly inhibiting their ability to spread throughout the body. Unfortunately, how these ring […]