Ayomikun Kade

Ayomikun Kade is one of the 2025 recipients of Dr Mrytle Pridgeon's scholarship, which is awarded to two postgraduate students working in Biomedical Science. He is a PhD student in the School of Life Sciences with a background in Microbiology.

Ayomikun's project is called "How do infectious sites affect the structure and biology of bacterial biofilm?"

He is supervised by Freya Harrison and Kim Hardie

Project Summary

The formation of multicellular biofilm is key to the progression of many bacterial infections. Biofilms are implicated in antibiotic-resistant infections in wounds, around the endotracheal tubes used to connect hospital patients to ventilators, and in the lungs of people with cystic fibrosis. While the environments differ, Pseudomonas aeruginosa is often found in these infection sites. However, our understanding of the structure and function of in-vivo biofilms is limited because the complexity of the environment in infectious sites and the complexity of the biofilm community are hard to mimic using standard lab models.

In this project, we are simulating the host environment using physiologically relevant media. This is combined with selected in vivo and ex vivo models, such as the ex vivo pig lung (EVPL), collagen-based wound, and endotracheal tube (ETT) models, to understand in vivo biofilms and its matrix composition using high-resolution techniques as well as the impact on antimicrobial susceptibility. The outcome of this research is geared towards a targeted approach to treatment using validated physiologically relevant media and models that can better predict treatment outcomes.