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In the Kroo Bay Slum in Sierra Leone, life expectancy was 35 years – and then Ebola hit. It was in that neighborhood that Nicole, a 31-year-old CDC communications expert deployed to fight the epidemic, saw what she was up against.

With drug-resistant bacteria on the rise, even common infections that were easily controlled for decades -- such as pneumonia or urinary tract infections -- are proving trickier to treat with standard antibiotics. New drugs are desperately needed, but so are ways to maximize the effective lifespan of these drugs. To accomplish that, Duke University researchers used software they developed to predict a constantly-evolving infectious bacterium's countermoves to one of these new drugs ahead of time, before the drug is even tested on patients.