We're looking for postdoctoral fellows!
Our lab studies new approaches for treatment of gram-negative bacteria and provides an excellent environment for postdoctoral fellows interested in clinical and translational microbiology. We are starting a project, funded by a new NIAID R01 grant, studying novel direct-acting beta-lactamase inhibitors in the diazabicyclooctane (DBO) class. These drugs, when combined with beta-lactam antibiotics, offer the promise of treating multidrug-resistant gram-negative bacterial infections that have few or no other treatment options – but resistance to DBOs and similar drugs develops rapidly in vitro, and it will be essential to understand how, and under which conditions, resistance develops, so that these drugs can be used most effectively to treat patients. The project will involve testing the activity of different DBO-containing combinations against a large collection of clinical multidrug-resistant bacterial strains, including E. coli, Klebsiella species, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, determining the frequency with which resistance emerges during drug exposure, performing DNA sequencing and RNA-Seq to understand resistance mechanisms, and using a variety of preclinical assays (including animal models and hollow-fiber infection models) to determine which combinations are most resilient against resistance.
We have a supportive, collaborative laboratory environment. The lab is located in the Center for Life Sciences building at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a Harvard Medical School Teaching Hospital. We work closely with colleagues in the hospital Clinical Microbiology lab (where Dr. Brennan-Krohn is a faculty member), the adjoining Kirby lab, and the Broad Institute Bacterial Genomics Group.
