Antibiotic-resistant bacteria kill ‘the same number as the population of Bray’ in Europe each year

Your research looks at ways to prevent hard-to-treat bacterial infections — what’s the goal?

We want to develop vaccines against bacteria that have themselves developed resistance to existing drugs. The hope is that this would save lives and also limit the spread of antibiotic resistance. I’m one of 15 PhD students in BactiVax, a European training network funded by the European Commission and co-ordinated by University College Dublin, and we are working in institutions across Europe towards this common goal.

How big an issue is antibiotic resistance in Europe?

In antibiotic resistance, it’s not that people become resistant to antibiotics, it’s the bacteria that evolve immunity to the antimicrobial drugs. And this means we can’t kill those bacteria any more, because we don’t have drugs that work against them.

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So if they cause an infection in someone who is vulnerable, it can become very serious. The European Centre for Disease Control recently published a report that there are more than 670,000 infections in Europe each year with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and it causes about 33,000 deaths. To put that annual number of deaths in Europe in perspective, it is about the same number as the population of Bray each year.

What would vaccines against drug-resistant bacteria do?

If we can vaccinate to prevent drug-resistant bacteria from causing infection — particularly among people who are more vulnerable, maybe they are in hospital or have a compromised immune system — then this would reduce the numbers of people who are badly affected by these bacteria.

And what is your PhD project about?

My work is focusing on three different bacteria which we are in an evolutionary race with: Acinetobacter baumannii, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Enterobacter species. They have developed resistance to antibiotics and we have limited treatment options for people who are infected.

We want to design vaccines against these bugs. My project is looking for suitable antigens, or targets, for those vaccines. We are focusing on T cells, which make up a big part of our immune systems and we think they are important for clearing these bacterial infections.

How has the Covid-19 pandemic affected your research?

I started in March 2020 and the university went into lockdown on my first day! But I was able to work remotely, using bioinformatics to analyse proteins that are common across the bacteria and could be good candidates for antigens that stimulate T cell responses. We could narrow the search that way, then we could test the candidates out when we were able to get back to the lab.

Were you interested in science when you were a child?

Yes, growing up in Poland I was interested in how things work, and I had a great teacher in school. My family moved to Buncrana in Co Donegal when I was 13, and after I finished school I studied microbiology at Trinity College Dublin. I came to Queen’s to do my master’s degree with Prof Miguel Valvano and now I am doing my PhD in his lab at the Wellcome-Wolfson Institute For Experimental Medicine.

And how do you take a break from it all?

I make sure I go on walks every day; that is time to clear my head. I also read a lot of things that are not related to science, lots of novels, just to take my mind off it and get that break. I am lucky I am still quite close to Donegal, so I can get home easily. It’s a lovely place, very relaxing and good for recharging the batteries.