INFECTION

The Infectious Disease group at PDRC is working towards overcoming problems in bacteriology, parasitology, virology and mycology fields. Interdisciplinary research is key to our strategies including investigating novel antimicrobial compounds, design and creating 'smart surfaces', to combat biofilms and infection transmission.

Research direction

Our work incorporates a broad range of diagnostic tools and approaches to the antimicrobial resistance crisis. Research into mechanisms of multi-drug resistance of clinical isolates by using advanced genomic and proteomic tools will provide us with insights to better understand mechanisms of resistance and develop novel targets for drug developments. Furthermore, we are using our drug design facilities in developing novel antimicrobial agents, naturally extracted compounds and nanoparticles against wide range of multidrug resistance pathogens. Our work also include efforts to set up regional surveillance of antimicrobial drugs. Combining these data with healthcare records will allow doctors to detect whether pathogens are increasing within the hospital or community or whether new ones are causing infections. We aim to find out whether bacteria are resistant or more capable of causing serious disease (virulent). This improves treatment and helps health system monitor infectious diseases . Researches in this group are aiming to build on the university first class capabilities in microbiology.

Techniques

• Broad ranges of bacterial culturing and cell culture techniques
• Antimicrobial susceptibility testing.
• Custom antimicrobial disk preparation for susceptibility testing.
• Bacterial biofilm formation assay.
• Specific gene amplification in a single or multiplex formats.
• Real time PCR quantitation of specific genetic sequence and viral load quantitation.
• Measuring antimicrobial activity from different sources of preparations including natural compounds, designed drugs and nanoparticles.
• Protein identification and analysis tools including western blotting, chromatographic isolation and purification, HPLC and mass-spectrophotometric analysis.