A/Professor Sam Forster
AMR IMPACT THEME
- AMR Evolution and Protective Microbiomes
EXPERTISE
- Antimicrobial resistance in host microbiomes
- Metagenomic analysis of complex communities
- Computational modelling of bacterial communities
- Discovery of novel antibiotics and antimicrobial resistance mechanisms within the human gastrointestinal microbiome
A/Prof Samuel Forster is a CSL Centenary Fellow and Research Group Head within the Centre for Innate Immunity and Infectious Diseases at the Hudson Institute of Medical Research. His team combines experimental and computational approaches to understand microbial communities, with a particular focus on modifying the human gastrointestinal microbiome to prevent and treat disease
Understanding how our microbiota is acquired and the forces that cause it to change provides important insights into why we get sick and how to maintain health. A/Prof Forster and his team seek to understand the relationship between our immune system, the microbiota community and susceptibility to diseases. This research is focused on:
- Analysis of the diversity of host cellular and transcriptional responses using in-vitro and in-vivo models of human microbiota communities
- Wide-scale metagenomic sequence-based analysis to understand microbiota community structure
- Computational modelling and machine learning based approaches to understand microbiota community dynamics in health and dysbiotic disease
This work ultimately seeks to provide novel live biotherapeutics and identify other therapeutic interventions to improve human health.
AMR FOCUS
- Novel antimicrobials from the human microbiome
- Antimicrobial alternative interventions using microbiome therapeutics
- Understanding sources of novel antimicrobial resistance within non-pathogenic organisms
- Understanding natural roles for antimicrobials within complex microbiome communities
IMPACT
- Novel Antimicrobials
- Novel Microbiome Therapeutics
- Australian Microbiome Culture Collection