Student receives Fulbright Grant to study new compounds against antibiotic-resistant bacteria
Jorge Gabriel Oliveira, a student in the BiotechHealth Doctoral Programme at the University of Porto and who is conducting research at i3S, recently received a Fulbright Grant. The grant will enable him to complete his doctoral project in the United States and discover new compounds to combat infections caused by extremely antibiotic-resistant mycobacteria.
Jorge Gabriel Oliveira will have the opportunity to spend approximately four months at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, US, under the guidance of researcher Beth Cimini at the Imaging Scientific Platform. He explains that this unit “is a leader in the field of image analysis and quantitative data extraction through microscopy images, and, as I intend to pursue this area after completing my doctorate, this internship represents a great opportunity to acquire the necessary specialisation to face the next challenge in my career.”
Jorge Gabriel Oliveira’s research project, which is being developed within the «Host Targets of Infection» group at i3S, focuses on combating infections caused by extremely antibiotic-resistant nontuberculous mycobacteria. Current treatments rely on long, toxic regimens; therefore, he stresses, “there is a great need to identify new compounds that are effective against these bacteria. With this goal in mind, I developed large-scale assays against these bacteria, capable of quickly testing thousands of drugs, and I discovered compounds that show highly promising activity against them.”
The researcher is now interested in mapping the changes these compounds induce in cells infected by these bacteria with the objective of “clarifying their mechanism of action and understanding which cellular pathways in infected cells could be therapeutic targets in the development of new compounds.”
Earlier this year, the doctoral student was awarded an IACOBUS grant, which allowed him to undertake an internship in Santiago de Compostela under the guidance of researcher José Floriani of the BioFarma group. This grant allowed him to learn the technique that he later implemented at i3S, and which generated the experimental data he will now analyse in the United States.