Amy H. Lee, Ph.D
Assistant Professor, Simon Fraser University, Department of Molecular Biology & Biochemistry
Infectious diseases are 3 of the top 10 leading causes of death globally. In low-income countries, communicable diseases cause more than half of all deaths, especially among vulnerable newborns. In high-income countries such as Canada, infections account for 2-7% of deaths. Bacterial infections are often treatable using antibiotics, but chronic misuse of antibiotics has created a critical global health threat by increasing the presence of antimicrobial resistant organisms, thus further compounding the problem. Given that communicable diseases cause significant personal, societal and economic burdens worldwide, the United Nations highlighted the importance to “accelerate the pace of progress made in fighting … communicable diseases and epidemics, including by addressing growing antimicrobial resistance” in its Sustainable Development Goals.
Our group is interested in applying systems biology approaches to untangle the dynamic interactions between antimicrobial resistant pathogens and the host by:
Infection is the most common cause of death in newborns, causing at least 2.6 million infant deaths per year. Even though the majority of newborn deaths occur in resource-poor countries, neonatal morbidity and mortality is also a significant problem in resource-rich countries.
Since the completion of the first bacterial genome in 1995, we have seen massive technological advances and cost reduction in genome sequencing over the last 25 years. This has resulted in a large number of available bacterial genomes (263,273 bacterial genomes available on NCBI as of 2020/09/19).
