Research Interests

In my lab, we are interested in understanding the mechanisms of bacterial infection and phage therapy inside the mammalian cell environment. Bacteriophages or phages are viruses that have great specificity towards targeting their host bacteria and thus can be used as therapeutics to tackle bacterial infections, what we define as phage therapy. The interest in phage therapy has grown increasingly over the past decade, due to the emerging problem of antibiotic resistance in many bacterial pathogens. A major challenge to patient safety is the hospital infections due to gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria resistant to antibiotics. One of the possible solutions to this problem is the use of bacteriophages as antimicrobial agents. Bacteriophages are safe for humans and present high specificity to their bacterial target, while having minimal side effects. However, there are still concerns for phage therapy, over the potential for immune responses, rapid toxin release by the lytic action of phages and difficulty of dose determination in clinical situations. Additionally, there is little knowledge of the cell biology behind phage therapy due to the challenges in the field and that is an obstacle in the rapid progress of phage therapy. We try in the lab to address all these concerns and achieve a better understanding of how phages interact with bacteria in human cell environment. We are also interested in the development of new methods that will enable bacteriophages to be used as reliable diagnostics of bacterial infection.

Scientific Inspiration

The Israeli Nobel Laureate Ada E. Yonath. I participated in the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting few years ago and I had the chance to meet her in person and listen to her talk. At the time I had just given birth to my second son and listening to her -who is an impressive scientist- to talk with so lovely words about her family, her daughter and grandchildren, I felt that it is possible to combine everything if you really want to. Great passion and love for what you do can help you achieve this. For me, for all these reasons, she is a role model and inspiration.