Background
Studying medicine opened my eyes to a wide number of global issues that are extremely difficult to address by front-line clinical practice alone. I realised the need to deepen my understanding of these problems and hence, applied to intercalate, studying antimicrobial resistance at MSc level. In my second year of medicine, I assisted in conducting research, in a project entitled ‘Identifying if a variant of Arfaptin-2 has therapeutic potential for ALS’. Whilst I was not able to conduct any wet laboratory work myself, due to COVID-19 restrictions, I gained an understanding for how processes were carried out and understood the real-world impact that novel ideas could have. Whilst studying on the AMR MSc, my eyes have been opened to the fact that we humans live in a microorganism’s world and I realised the hidden complexity behind fixing what may initially appear as an easy-to-solve problem. I believe this course will guide me as a future clinician, helping me better serve patients, equipped with a new-found understanding of antimicrobial resistance and what can be done to help. 
Florey Research Project
Florey MSc Research Project: Understanding how antimicrobial resistance deactivates cancer chemotherapies Enteropathogenic E. coli (EPEC) is a diarrhoea-causing enteric pathogen, particularly affecting children in developing countries, where it causes significant morbidity and mortality. Clofarabine (CIF) is a nucleoside analogue currently used to treat refractive acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, a cancer of childhood. An unpublished screen of drugs showed CIF had some abrogative properties against EPEC infection. For my project, I investigated this finding further, looking to see if the anti-infective properties were exclusive to EPEC or common among enteric pathogens alongside looking into the mechanisms behind the aforementioned observations. Early in the experiment, it was noted that CIF’s ability to suppress EPEC growth was limited and after some time, EPEC gained apparent resistance to CIF. I conducted my project in Dan Humphreys’ lab, focusing on two lines of investigation:
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The Team
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