Major scientific breakthrough against bacterial resistance: the results of nearly 20 years of international research driven by Stéphane Vincent

Antibiotic resistance is one of today’s most urgent public health challenges. At UNamur, Prof. Stéphane Vincent, head of the Laboratory of Bio-Organic Chemistry, aims at developing new weapons to overcome bacterial resistance, with a particular focus on biofilm-producing bacteria. Biofilms – communities of microbial cells embedded in a self-produced extracellular polymeric matrix – are a major cause of treatment failure, as they protect bacteria from antibiotic action.

To address this issue, Stéphane Vincent is exploring an innovative concept: Dynamic Constitutional Frameworks (DCFs). These supramolecular structures, which constantly assemble and disassemble, can interact with essential cell components such as proteins or DNA. Nearly 20 years of international collaborative research have finally shown a remarkable potential for DCFs as antibacterial agents and biofilm disruptors.

The story began in Strasbourg, where Stéphane Vincent completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Nobel Prize winner Jean-Marie Lehn, a pioneer of supramolecular chemistry.

The first promising results then emerged from a joint PhD thesis by Andrei Diaconu at UNamur (Stéphane Vincent) and University of Montpellier (Mihail Barboiu), demonstrating that DCFs can inhibit and weaken biofilms, thereby exposing bacteria to their environment (Diaconu et al., 2021).

The research took a major step forward when postdoctoral researcher Dmytro Strilets joined UNamur thanks to support from the Connect with Wallonia – Come 2 Wallonia (C2W) program. Within this European project, called TADAM, conducted in collaboration with UGhent (Tom Coenye) and VUB (Charles Van der Henst), the team designed an ingenious assembly combining DCFs with pillararenes. Pillararenes act as cages around the antibiotic levofloxacin, while DCFs weaken the biofilm, allowing the drug to reach the bacteria. The findings are impressive: DCFs-pillararene assemblies are up to four times more effective than levofloxacin alone (Strilets et al, 2025).

While current results are extremely promising, key questions remain, in particular regarding how these molecular systems work. Dmytro Strilets has just received a Chargé de Recherche mandate from the FNRS to develop second-generation DCFs and study their mode of action.

The TADAM project has received funding from the UNamur and the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement n°101034383.