Blog and news. Fighting microbial pathogens by integrating host ecosystem interactions and evolution. Disease-dependent interaction policies to support health and economic outcomes during the COVID epidemic. When, why and how tumour clonal diversity predicts survival.
Phage steering of antibiotic-resistance evolution in the bacterial pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Environmentally mediated social dilemmas. An ecosystem framework for understanding and treating disease. Spatial competition constrains resistance to targeted cancer therapy. Minus van Baalen PostDoc. Olivier Plantard PhD. Sam Brown PostDoc. Corinne Vacher PhD. Nicolas Mouquet PostDoc. Alexandre Roulin PostDoc.
Michael Brockhurst PostDoc. Andrei Akhmetzhanov PostDoc. Robert Noble PostDoc. Our main objective is to produce and test predictive theory of the ecology and evolution of disease. Our work focuses on micro-parasites and cancer cells that can attain enormous population sizes within their hosts and therefore are subject to within host evolution and at larger biological scales, host-parasite co-evolution, and have made significant inroads to fundamental research questions and applications to medicine.
As summarized below, we have shown notably how space and environment arbitrate disease ecology and evolution at different biological levels, and also explain evolutionary transitions from conflict to cooperation and from parasitism to mutualism, these latter themes producing a more general conceptual framework for how environment interacts with social evolution.
Our group has been at the forefront of applying the idea of evolutionary-rational therapy therapeutic approaches that prevent, limit or circumvent the evolution of resistance to bacterial diseases Hochberg These studies commenced with fundamental research on bacteria-phage ecology and evolution in laboratory microcosms Buckling et al.
