We are excited to announce that Harvard Medical School’s Christoph M. Ernst, PhD, will present for our May 26^th Levy CIMAR Science Lunch. Dr. Ernst is a postdoctoral research fellow in bacterial pathogenesis, genomics, epidemiology and chemical biology in the laboratory of Professor Deborah T. Hung, MD, PhD. His talk is titled, “Adaptive evolution of virulence and persistence in carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniaeinfections.”

Dr. Ernst studies the impact of adaptive mutations that are selected in bacterial infections to identify clinically relevant mechanisms of antibiotic treatment failure and bacterial pathogenesis and develop new antimicrobial strategies. His work has revealed global adaptive evolution of virulence and persistence in carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae infections and an intrinsic ability of K. pneumoniae to persist in an antibiotic-tolerant state in bladder epithelial cells. He has recently targeted intracellular K. pneumoniae in a chemical screen that led to the discovery of a host-targeting compound that induces broad spectrum intracellular antimicrobial activity and displays efficacy in mouse models of urinary tract infection. In his prior work, Dr. Ernst’s studies on the adaptive evolution of daptomycin resistance in Staphylococcus aureus infections led to the discovery of a major family of bacterial phospholipid flippases and to the development of flippase inhibiting monoclonal antibodies that sensitize S. aureus to host defenses. You can learn more about his work and publications here.