Georgia Lagoudas (Blainey Lab)

Characterizing the Lung Microbiome and its Effect in the Host Environment

The healthy lung is home to its own community of microbes, a recent discovery that has overturned the long-held belief that lungs are sterile. Since lung microbes have been shown to correlate with lung disease, we work to characterize microbes in healthy and diseased animal models. We demonstrate that lung microbes are a living population with altered community profiles in diseased states.

Tony Kulesa (Blainey Lab)

An Efficient Discovery Platform for Combination Antibiotics

Antibiotic-resistant infections cause >23,000 deaths and $20-35 billion in direct healthcare costs, but discovery efforts for new antibiotics have largely failed. Combinations of compounds could access new targets at higher discovery rates. However, the shear combinatorics quickly makes screening intractable. Even 1000 compounds produces 500,000 pairwise combinations to test. We will present a new droplet microfluidic platform to bring combinatorial discovery within reach by lowering costs and increasing throughput >10-fold.