Amber De Bleeckere
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Amber de Bleeckere Laboratory of Pharmaceutical Microbiology (LPM) |
Amber De Bleeckere graduated in Pharmaceutical Sciences (Master in Drug Development) at Ghent University in 2019 and started her PhD at the LPM lab in February 2020.
Her research focusses on the development of novel high throughput susceptibility assays that better predict the antimicrobial susceptibility in biofilms. Microbial biofilms are communities of microbial cells and are involved in many chronic infections. Their presence is often an important reason of failure of antimicrobial therapy.
Typically, the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) is used to determine the antimicrobial susceptibility of a pathogen and to guide treatment. While MIC values can accurately predict treatment success in acute infections involving planktonic cells, they do not predict success in treating biofilm associated infections. An important reason for this discrepancy is that the environmental conditions in a biofilm are different from those in a planktonic culture, and this difference is not considered when evaluating antimicrobial susceptibility.
A novel approach to overcome this problem is to replace the general media that are used in conventional antimicrobial susceptibility testing by artificial media, specific for different types of biofilm associated infections, that better mimic the in vivo situation. This approach is being tested for different types of biofilms associated infections, such as cystic fibrosis, chronic wounds and prosthetic joint infections.