Research Projects

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in bacterial infections caused 1.27 million deaths in 2019, and there is a pressing need to find methods to tackle AMR, including adjuvant therapies and reversing AMR. Ocular infections are also on the rise, as the eye is not a replaceable organ and all systemic antibiotics cannot be administered in these infections. Advanced molecular techniques like NGS have shown that more culture-based monomicrobial infections are polymicrobial, making them more difficult to treat and persistent. Antagonistic interactions exist among pathogens or between pathogens and commensals in clinical scenarios, and researchers hypothesize that these interactions can be harnessed for adjuvant therapy in tackling AMR. The eye, being a paucimicrobial environment, is a suitable model for studying such interactions without interference from commensals or contaminants. The scientific objectives are to study and analyze the effects of polymicrobial interactions in simulated polymicrobial infections in an ex-vivo model of human donor corneas. The hypothesis is that social interactions among pathogenic microbes affect virulence and AMR of individual organisms in an antagonistic or synergistic manner. The main experiments will focus on phenotypic and genotypic effects of polymicrobial interactions on ocular isolates' antimicrobial susceptibility and biofilm formation, as well as the expression of AMR and virulence genes in study isolates. The study's significance lies in the potential role of bioengineered antagonistic strains, quorum sensing pathways regulation, and bacteriophages as adjuvant therapies to tackle AMR, as well as further animal studies to account for host immunity.