We have a conversation including our first citizen scientist to kick of 2023. Lou Kellett is an active participant in the Liverpool School of Tropical medicine Swab and Send programme, which is striving to find the next breakthrough in bacteria to defeat antimicrobial resistance.

We also hear from Dr. Adam Roberts, the creator of the programme, and Dr. Amy McLeman, who is taking the bacteria that shows promising results, through to the next stage of investigation in the lab.

Swab and Send is an innovative programme that relies on the anticipation of citizens to infinitely broaden the search for a solution to the AMR problem.

Amy provides us with an insight:

“Antimicrobials can be produced by bacteria or fungus from anywhere; from the soil in your local park to your kitchen sink. These are just two of the places we are looking for the next new antibiotics and it works! We are finding microbes producing interesting antimicrobials that our team are working on characterising, but did you know it can take 10-15 years and over $1.7 billion to develop a new antibiotic from discovery to market. Even then once a new antibiotic is being sold the investment return is less than $50 million on average each year. Research and development costs massively outweigh the financial return”.

About our guests:

Dr. Adam Roberts – Reader, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine

Adam Roberts leads a research group investigating various aspects of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) from molecular biology and evolution of transferable AMR to genomic surveillance and antimicrobial drug discovery.

Dr. Amy McLeman - Postdoctoral Research Associate, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine

Amy works as a postdoctoral research associate on discovery and characterisation of novel antimicrobials from environmental isolates. Her work includes outreach to individuals and communities to communicate the importance of AMR and what Swab and Send is doing to tackle this, and to also encourage involvement of the public to take swabs of everything and anything and send them into us to look for the next antibiotic.

Lou Kellett – Active Citizen Scientists, Wales, UK

Lou has worked in local food and farming business for the last couple of decades, including organic farming. An active participant in many citizen science projects, Lou is particularly enthusiastic about the swab and send programme as it creates the opportunity for to share the unique local environmental habitats with the wider world. Lou finds being an active citizen scientist is a great way satiate a hungry sense of curiosity.

Relevant links:

https://www.lstmed.ac.uk/public-engagement/swab-send                                   

https://www.facebook.com/swabandsend/

https://www.future-science.com/doi/10.2144/fsoa-2020-0053

#SwabAndSend

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Hello and welcome to the Connecting Citizens to Science Podcast.

I'm Dr.

Kim Ozano.

This is a podcast about how communities and people join with researchers and scientists to

Please don't forget to like great share and subscribe so that we can continue to share voices from around the

We hope you enjoy.

Well, haven't I got a fantastic episode for you today?

It's the Swab and Send programme from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.

The idea of this is really to put citizens in the driving seat of identifying new bacteria to help in the fight

The idea behind the programme is that we, as the public, go out and collect samples of anything we think may be home to bacteria.

We swab that area, we put it in a little tube containing black agar and we send it off to the scientist at Liverpool School of

So let's go ahead and meet our guests.

Today we have Amy McLeman, who is a post-doc research associate at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine,

And we also have Adam Roberts, who is the real driving force behind this programme.

So Adam, welcome to our podcast.

Tell us the story of how this began and what it's all about.

Hello everybody.

Swab and Send came into my mind in about 2015 and I wanted to carry out a project which both engaged the public in

The main premise behind the Swab and Send project is that the antibiotics that we currently use to

The um, the rates of resistance in bacteria are increasing across the globe, and unfortunately, there's not a

One of the things that many people may not know is that the majority of the antibiotics that we use are naturally produced

Alexander Fleming was just very, very lucky when he noticed that one particular fungus on an agar plate

So there was this kind of zone of inhibition around the fungus.

It was pumping out this antibiotic, which was later called penicillin.

Um, and it was killing the staphylococcus bacterium that Alexander Fleming was working on.

That was the first time anybody noticed that the natural products, these antibiotics that we now use in medicine

And I thought why don't we look for other bacteria and fungi that can produce antibiotics?

We might find some novel ones.

Now, most of the antibiotics that we get at the moment are produced by bacteria and fungi from soil originally.

Soil is a really diverse community of bacteria and fungi.

You only have to look very easily and you will find bacteria that produce an antibiotic, but the unfortunate thing is

I thought that was a really key way to bring in citizens to decide exactly where we'd look for bacteria

It wasn't at the start, supposed to be something that would last years and years and years.

I just wanted to try it out.

Within the first two weeks, ITV News had got hold of it and it was on their website, and then it just went from strength

It continued to evolve as a project, both online and in the laboratory and I was really lucky to have, within

We started to find quite a lot of activity.

By activity, I mean we started to find quite a lot of microbes that produced antibiotics and killed

These are important clinical pathogens, so that enabled us to put all of this data on the website and say, "Hey look, this is working".

Then that snowballed and more people started to take part.

It appeared in the Atlantic Magazine over in the States, so we got a lot of interest from the USA.

Then I moved to LSTM in 2017 and the project came with me and LSTM really got behind it in a big way

People know about it, it's known within the community and we get repeat participants from various schools and

It's going really well and we've got lots of hits which have gone into the more traditional drug discovery science that we do.

It's a successful project that's started out small and has become a big thing, self-sustainable on its own, and it's really good fun.

It's really amazing.

It has astounded me what a journey you've been on personally and to see it grow so much.

It feels like a movement.

It's really different to other citizen science approaches.

It feels much bigger than just a science project.

Let's hear more from someone who's directly involved in it.

Lou Kellet, welcome to the podcast.

You are one of these fantastic citizen scientists that are engaged in this project.

Tell us why and how?

I think I came across it in the first place on, uh, Adam being interviewed on Radio four.

I was working on my friend's farm at the time, and I thought, that sounds interesting because we're more or less organic, we didn't

So I sent off for a set of swabs and thought I must have some things around here that other people won't have access to.

So I'll go and poke at those.

How do you decide what to poke at, I think was the term you used there?

How often do you do it?

Tell us a little bit more about that.

I guess I was thinking of what I've got access to that other people might not.

So, I was helping my boss to clear out the loft of the milking parlor and there was his great granddad's beekeeping hives in there.

I thought "that's unusual".

They haven't been touched since about the 1930s.

There might be something hanging around on there.

I did a local stone circle just because I thought the conspiracy theories would be funny if it

Just depends on seeing something and thinking, "oh, how about that"?

Amazing.

It really does sound like you look for unusual areas to swab.

We have Amy with us who is a scientist.

How does that fit in?

Amy?

Is that what you're looking for citizens to do?

Yeah, exactly.

So we're just looking for everyone to look at something they think is interesting and send us whatever it is.

We've had some really interesting things in; from older religious artifacts that have been lost and

It's just really cool to get things that are so different and that we personally don't have access to.

This is one of the important aspects of the project because we want to not

One of the best ways to almost randomise your sample collection is to ask the public, because they have such a collective

A project really relies on their imagination and simply being prepared if they see something, it could just

Just being able to be prepared and think, "actually that could be quite interesting", let's

Okay, that's, that's helping me understand more.

Lou, I understand that you've not connected directly with the scientists at Liverpool School

Do you have any questions?

I have loads of questions.

Fire away.

Okay, what actually happens to the swabs that we send, because I've had pictures back from Adam before of an

That's a great question, Lou.

What the team does in the lab when they receive the swabs is to streak them out onto an agar plate (that's just a, to run the swab over

And then we watch the colonies grow.

The colonies really represent individual bacterial cells from the swabs which are replicating.

In one little colony of bacteria on an agar plate, you may have 10 million cells and that's now enough for us to work on.

We will then take that colony and we will put that in what we call a microtiter plate.

This is essentially a plastic plate with 96 wells in it, all grided out.

Very, very tidy.

If you can imagine each one of those wells now has a little bit of liquid growth media for the bacteria and 96 individual

Now that agar plate has been pre inoculated with the pathogens, so the disease causing bacteria that we want to try and kill.

It could be MRSA for example, it could be E.coli and what happens now is that all of those 96 different bacteria are growing at

If any of those 96 different bacteria from the swab are producing an antibiotic themselves, that will diffuse into the

Okay?

So if one of the bacteria from one of your swabs produces this zone of inhibition, it means it's producing something which

We'll then take that and we'll put that in what we call our hit plate.

This is another plastic plate with 96 wells.

In that plate, there's only the ones that are active against our indicator strand.

That's what we then pass over to Amy to do the more traditional scientific investigations to allow us to try and determine

When I get the sample we've got an idea that they're active and that there's something in there that we want to research.

Then I try and separate out all the different things that the bacteria produced.

We've got a piece of equipment, it looks very fancy, it looks very technical, but all it does is it separates out all of

Then we can look at them more separated, see if the activity's still there, and we can start to look at what

So that's further along the line.

And that process can take up to 10 years.

If you're a pharmaceutical company, for example, with 200 people in the department looking at drug discovery, they may be able to screen

We're a little bit smaller scale than that so things take time after that initial microbiology work.

So some of the things that we're looking at, which are really exciting, we project would be in a

Wow.

Okay.

So if you've got something and it looks like it's gonna work, how do you go about getting more of it?

Like, do you synthesise what the person's swabbed?

If it's something you can't go back and swab again?

Great question.

So, you know the original 96 well plate that I talked about, where we've got all of the bacteria, so we also store those in the freezer.

We can always go back to the original bacteria, so we don't need to revisit the site.

Currently, we have almost 60,000 different types of environmental bacteria, and that's one of the largest libraries of environmental

That's a really valuable resource with which we could screen endlessly with different things.

How much freezer space does that take up?

Quite a lot!

Our freezers are about the size of a car.

Okay.

You imagine a car on its end that's the size of a normal minus 80 degree freezer but just going back to

We can get gram scale amounts if the synthesis pathway is relatively easy and not too expensive.

Then we can do all kinds of toxicology studies on it, looking for emergence of resistance in different pathogens.

At that point, we no longer actually need the original producing bacteria.

We've really separated ourselves from the swab and then the bacteria itself, so we've just got this little pot

I have a question just leading on from that, Adam, in terms of communication back to citizens who have taken their

I wanted to use a platform that was free because we had no resources for it and also

It's a really effective way to archive all of the data that we've produced.

If you go onto the Facebook Swab and Send page, you can see all the way back to the inception of the project

We get variable amounts of hits on the various posts, so if we get samples from a particular school, we'll see that everybody

That's really great because you know it's having a good penetration into that particular audience.

In addition to the results that we generate from the swabs, we also put things on Facebook, which are just

I think it was the new year of 2018, or it might have been 2016, I just put a quote from Alexander Fleming on the warning he gave in his

That went viral and that reached over a million individuals and that really cemented Swab and Send as

I would say Facebook is our best platform for reporting the results, but Twitter is a lot better for publicising

There's a kind of a different audience on those two platforms.

This is a really great example and at the Connecting Citizens to Science Podcast, we talk a lot about communication and

So it's really great that you have found that and quite innovative as well in terms of generating activities.

I think that's really useful for our listeners to understand.

Amy, I guess you're quite removed from the citizen aspect in the laboratory.

Do you have any questions for Lou?

I do get to do some outreach, which is, it's quite fun, but difficult for me to know why some people are a little bit hesitant

It would be nice to know what made you want to join in and maybe what made you a little bit hesitant if you were hesitant, or if

I just like taking part in, in sciencey projects really.

I'm not at all a scientist.

I work in food and farming, but I just like the idea of being part of it and the premise that the more people you got involved, then

Wonderful.

Adam, I think what we would like to understand is what are some of the barriers that you've come across through the many years you've

So longevity of a project such as this is important.

It's really unlikely to be a success, both in terms of public engagement and in terms of finding any new

You have to plan for that longevity.

What was fundamentally important was the institutional support, because then we could make it mainstream.

That's institutional support is both in terms of publicity and support for the landing page at LSTM, there was a pledging site

I would advise people to think about it at an early stage otherwise you can get into all kinds of bureaucratic difficulties

Um, the other thing that I would say is it's really important to have an enthusiastic team.

I came up with the project, I acknowledge that, but I haven't done all the work.

The work has been done by my team over the years and fantastic current team that we have, and they've really embraced it.

It's really shown dividends as well, because recently we wrote it into a large grant application and that was subsequently funded.

That transition from what you could call a hobby to a core component of your daily work is really important because, it's

Great.

Thank you very much.

Amy, you were a postdoc, so you did your PhD in your postdoc on this project.

How does this fit in terms of your career within, well, health systems more widely really?

I've come from quite a diverse study background actually.

I've done conservation, I've done plant pathology.

My PhD was on pesticide drug discovery.

I've done some AMR, antimicrobial resistance, work before.

For me, it's a really important subject and it's got a lot of lifespan in terms of career plans.

It's an interesting project, like I think.

Lou, if I was not a scientist, I would be like you, joining in these public science things because I just find it interesting.

It's really nice to be in the project and actually working on it and seeing these swabs come in and all the samples.

Drug discovery and looking for new solutions to antimicrobial resistance is where I want to be.

Wonderful.

Thanks very much.

Adam, you said in six years time, we might see results here.

What is the overall aspiration here in terms of the gold standard of what could be achieved?

There are two, two aspirations from the project.

One is to increase awareness and subsequent stewardship of the antibiotics that we currently have.

People are only going to look after them if they realise how important they are to our society, not just in the healthcare

Also, there is a possibility that we may find something which is potentially a new antibiotic.

Now that is a needle in a haystack in a field full of haystacks, and there's no way to change that.

But if we don't look, we'll never find, and success doesn't depend entirely on finding the next new penicillin.

What we could find is a novel molecule which affects a new drug target in a bacterial cell, because not only do we need new

If we found something that affected a new target in or on a bacteria, we could then screen all of the different

That may open up a whole new field and a whole new class of antibiotics.

So each of those incremental steps, increasing our knowledge is important.

It's very unlikely there'll just be a huge leap and we'll find a medicine ready molecule.

Quite often what we'll find is something which works, but doesn't work very well, but then our medicinal chemists

This is what takes years and years.

So we come up with a derivative of that original molecule, which works better, only targets bacteria, and is able to

Success is an increase in knowledge in any one of those fields really.

That really helps me to understand the scope of work that has gone into this to reach those end goals.

Lou, you are a citizen scientist.

What piece of advice would you give to others who want to be involved in projects like this?

Just go for it.

It might be slightly intimidating in the first place if you're swabbing something in public and people give you funny

It sounds like you really enjoy it and are an asset, so we're glad to have you here.

Amy, advice for others in your position.

One of the challenges, and I've spoken to other people in community science projects, is getting

Adam's very good at the social media.

I do a lot more of the in-person things, so at conferences I've asked everyone to take a swab of their shoes while they're there.

I've got quite a big family, so I've got all of them involved and they're over the country.

It's just getting as many people involved as you can and being quite open to talk about it and take questions about it.

Talking to other people in citizen science projects to get ideas of how they're doing outreach is one of the best ways to get started.

A real sense of community there.

I love that.

Adam, final piece of advice and, and anything you want our listeners to take home from this conversation?

I would say two things.

I'd say if you are thinking of starting your own citizen science, don't be fearful of the consequences of failure.

Even if it lasts for a month or two, it's probably gonna be useful for somebody.

Just run them enthusiastically and put the work in and make it work for as long as they're tenable.

Secondly, what I would say is to potential participants, echo what Lou says.

Have a go.

You know, you never know.

It's such a random project that you might be the lucky one that finds something.

Key message there, have a go, and I think I'm taking that home at a personal level already.

I'm getting out there and swabbing and sending the minute I finished this recording.

So thank you so much to all of our guests.

I've really enjoyed the conversation.

Thank you for our listeners do like rate, share and subscribe so that we can get messages like this out to everyone so that people and