School of Infection & Immunity

Dr Freya Harrison

Title: Ancientbiotics Using historical medical remedies to discover combinations of natural products with powerful antibiofilm activity

Synopsis:

My lab is part of a team of researchers from different disciplines – microbiologists, philologists, medicinal chemists and pharmacologists – who are working together to study the history of infectious disease, and to see if it can inform our future responses to pathogens. In this seminar, I will talk about two projects where we have used a expert-informed approach to selecting historical infection remedies, which involve combining two or more natural products, for antibiofilm efficacy testing. Focussed explorations of oxymel, a combination of honey and vinegar, led to the discovery that acetic acid and medical-grade honey can have synergistic biofilm eradication activity. Both of these substances are used individually in the clinical management to infected wounds, but we cannot find any evidence of them being combined in modern practice. Secondly, I will present recent work on a synthetic cocktail of natural compounds derived from an early medieval infection remedy, which we began researching over a decade ago. We have identified a small number of compounds present in the remedy, which we have optimised and combined with a potentiator compound to generate a defined, dosable formulation which is amenable to preclinical development as a topical antimicrobial, and for which a patent application has been filed.

Bio:

I research how pathogenic bacteria respond to the environment in an infection, interact with each other tolerate high doses of antibiotics. I have a particular focus on the slimy multi-celled aggregates of microbes called biofilms that form during chronic infections. My group works to design and build laboratory platforms for growing biofilms in conditions that mimic the infected host as accurately as possible, while remaining tractable and cheap. We investigate how the microbes in these environments are able to become so resistant to antibiotics, and we collaborate with colleagues in the the UK and around the world to test potential new treatments in these models. I hope that my  work helps us to identify new and better ways to cure life-threatening infections. I also work with colleagues from the arts & humanities in the AncientBiotics consortium - my team reconstructs historical remedies for infection, and tests them in the lab using our biofilm models. We want to better understand historical medical knowledge, and use historical remedies as a database of potential novel compounds that could be developed into medicines to prevent and treat infection.

First published: 19 August 2025

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