A profile of... Dr Meera Unnikrishnan
Dr Meera Unnikrishnan is an Associate Professor in Biomedical Sciences. Last year, she was awarded a Wellcome Discovery Award of over £2m from the Wellcome Trust for research into C. difficile infection. We spoke to Meera to find out more about this and her involvement in Warwick Medical School's public engagement work.
Congratulations on your award! Can you tell us more about what this project is about?
Our guts contain a barrier formed by mucus, gut cells and the microbiota. This barrier contains commensals, the ‘good’ bacteria, which protect us from bacterial pathogens. However, sometimes certain pathogens can overcome these defences, establish themselves and cause an infection.
This project is going to be looking at the three-way interactions between a pathogen – in this case C. difficile,the host (our own cells) and the commensals.
The idea is to understand better at a single-cell level what’s happening at the gut-microbial interface. We want to understand how C. difficile establishes itself in the gut, how it overcomes commensal and host defences.
How will you do this?
We’ll be engineering an innovative system that will allow us to do these single-cell studies. We’re going to make a colon-on-a-chip that will mimic the gut, along with synthetic communities of bacteria that will mimic the gut microbiota. This will allow us to track how the pathogen interacts with the host and the microbiota, and further identify proteins key for these interactions. One of the reasons why research in this area is lacking is because of a lack of systems with the right environmental controls. The bacteria in the gut and C. difficile can’t survive in oxygen, while the gut cells need oxygen, so we need better dual-environment systems to study interactions.
Why did you choose to focus on C. difficile?
We’re focusing on C. difficile because it’s a highly antibiotic-resistant pathogen that causes severe diarrhoea. Recurring infections are a huge clinical problem. You would usually get C. difficile infection if you’re on long-term courses of antibiotics - these antibiotics would affect your microbiota. It is commonly seen in elderly people, and in patients on long-term medications in hospital. Although the focus of the work will be on C. difficile, we hope that the tools we develop will enable us to study other pathogens in the future.
How will this research benefit people?
We need a deeper understanding of the cellular interactions between commensal bacteria and C. difficile, to design and develop better cocktails of gut bacteria (microbiome-based therapeutics) against C. difficile infections. The hope is that people could take such cocktails while on long-term antibiotics to prevent gut infections.
Currently, because C. difficile is so highly resistant, one has to resort to treatments like faecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), which restores the healthy microbiota. Although effective, there are safety concerns associated with FMT. So we hope that our project will help develop alternative safe treatments.
This year the theme for International Women's Day is 'Inspire Inclusion'. How do you inspire inclusion at Warwick?
My research group has always been diverse, with trainees coming from different parts of the world. I have mentored several international early career researchers, helping them to shape their research careers. We also have many international and cross-disciplinary collaborations, which have provided excellent training opportunities for ECRs.
I am also co-lead the Public Engagement-Outreach Athena SWAN subgroup and lead the WMS work experience programme for students from local secondary schools. Last summer we hosted 11 students in different laboratories, including some from widening participation schools. It’s great to see students embarking on their journey in science and I enjoy being involved in it. Recently I’ve also assisted some PhD students to set up a new science newsletter that is aimed to reach under-privileged areas of Coventry in collaboration with the Warwick Widening Participation team. We hope it will encourage more students to take up science.