The number of lives lost annually due to antimicrobial resistance is increasing, and by 2050,
is estimated to reach 10 million. I aspire to establish an independent research program
focused on validating new drug targets and identifying new drugs to combat key pathogenic
microbes responsible for human disease. In this way, I hope to help rebuild what is currently
a dangerously underdeveloped antimicrobial drug discovery pipeline. Primarily, my research
has and will continue to focus on two of the ‘big three’ infectious diseases – malaria (caused
by Plasmodium parasites) and tuberculosis (TB, caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis),
which claimed 0.4 and 1.4 million lives worldwide, respectively, in 2019 alone. In this
presentation, I will demonstrate how I am taking a multi-level approach to discover drug
targets, specifically through learning from successful antimicrobials and uncovering microbial
dependencies critical within the relevant host environment. I will also show the various
approaches I am using to discover new drugs, which include (i) drug repurposing and (ii)
fragment-based drug discovery, an approach by which inhibitors are iteratively built from
small chemical fragments using protein structures to guide the process. I combine protein
biophysics and biochemistry, structural biology, cell and molecular biology, and cellular
biochemistry, to achieve a holistic understanding of drug targets and their interactions with
ligands. The research is both fundamental and translational.