Philip Fowler

My research focusses on mitigating antimicrobial resistance, with a current focus on tuberculosis. 

1. Improve the quality of phenotype measurements collected by the international TB consortium, CRyPTIC. This project is tests the antibiotic susceptibility of >25,000 clinical strains collected worldwide using a commercial 96-well microtitre plate. In addition to the measurements carried out in the partner laboratories, a photo of each plate is read by some software, AMyGDA, that I developed. I also run BashTheBug which is a Citizen Science project that invites anyone to help us classify especially difficult images. The large dataset collected by CRyPTIC will not only enable the construction of a more accurate tuberculosis resistance catalogue but also will open up new, interesting avenues of AMR research.

2. Develop de novo methods that can predict the effect of protein mutations on a specific antibiotic. I approach this problem from a protein structure perspective; to date we have applied molecular simulation and machine learning methods to predict AMR.