ARC DECRA Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University, in the School of Natural Sciences and in the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology
There are very few antibiotics available that can effectively kill modern-day germs that make us sick. Nasty bacteria have developed clever strategies to resist our miracle drugs and it’s been more than 40 years since any new antibiotics were discovered. We’re in a pickle.
Molecular biologist Dr Amy Cain tackles antibiotic resistance using innovative functional genomic techniques. She and her multi-disciplinary research team seek to understand how bugs became resistant to antibiotics so that new drugs can be intelligently designed to outsmart them.
Dr Cain established and leads Australia’s first fully-functional Facility for the greater wax moth caterpillar Galleria mellonella as a versatile and ethical animal model for assessing the ability of an organism to cause disease, as well as the toxicity and effectiveness of new drugs. Dr Cain’s work will bring much-needed antibiotics closer to market in a more streamlined manner.
Dr Cain was awarded her PhD in Microbiology at University of Sydney in 2012 and is currently an ARC DECRA Fellow at Macquarie University’s School of Natural Sciences and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology.
Learn more about Dr Cain’s research in this short video.