URBANA — Tricking dangerous bacteria into becoming harmless ones is the goal of a prize-winning chemist at the University of Illinois.

Douglas A. Mitchell, 31, is a winner of the 2011 National Institutes of Health Director's New Innovator Award, one of two in the state (the other at Northwestern University).

He will receive $1.5 million over five years for the honor, which "supports young investigators who have proposed exceptionally creative research ideas that have the potential to produce important medical advances."

"I'll be using the money to study the next-generation approach to antibiotics," Mitchell said Monday.

Unlike broad-spectrum antibiotics, which kill many bacteria in the body — including the useful ones that control digestion, for instance — these new drugs won't kill any bacteria but will change bacterial genetics so toxins are not produced.

With antibiotic-resistant MRSA — methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a type of staph bacteria — an increasing fear in hospitals, killing more Americans than HIV, Mitchell wants to use an entirely different approach to treatment.

"We want to revolutionize the field. We want to change the game, because the game isn't working," he said.

Mitchell has yet to do animal studies in his lab, and no human testing has been done anywhere, so it may be some time before the new treatments appear — and the scientist noted that pharmaceutical companies may not be tugging at the reins to market them.

Because each drug will be aimed at a specific disease-causing bacterium for a matter of days or weeks, drug companies may not find the new drugs as profitable as other, daily-use products.

"If you have high cholesterol or erectile dysfunction or beta blockers, these are lifestyle drugs," he said. "These new drugs will have an ultra-narrow spectrum."

That's why, he argues, "we need government-sponsored academic institutions to bear the burden of risk."

But the UI could license the new drugs, he added.

Mitchell uses chemical methods to study the mechanisms for bacterial virulence as well as antibiotic resistance.

The Mitchell laboratory is a multidisciplinary team that draws from the chemical biology, organic chemistry, pharmacology, structural biology, bioinformatics and microbiology.

He is looking specifically on the thiazole/oxazole-modified microcins, a diverse and recently recognized class of microbial compounds, which he describes as a "treasure trove of bioactive molecules awaiting further exploration."

Some of these compounds have antibiotic or anticancer activity, others are toxins. One of the toxins causes anthrax.

One of Mitchell's most recent scientific papers discusses disarming anthrax before it develops resistance to antibiotics. If allowed to thrive, the bacteria will either mutate or die, and those that survive will be extremely hard to kill off, he said.

"A few survivors end up being dominant at the end," Mitchell added.

One problem with bacteria is that they have the potential for "horizontal gene transfer," allowing a pathogenic microbe to pass its toxin-producing genes to one that had previously been harmless to humans.

Another problem that needs to be worked on is better medical diagnostics to make use of ultra narrow-spectrum drugs.

He said that if the drugs were available, medicine would be empowered to create more specific diagnoses.

A Pittsburgh native, Mitchell earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University in 2002. He interned in medicinal chemistry at Merck Research Laboratories, then earned his doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley in 2006. He also worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at San Diego.

Mitchell joined the UI in 2009.