News

16. October 2026 – ICARe course participation

This week I had the privilege to being trained at the Interdisciplinary Course on Antibiotics and Resistance (ICARe) in beautiful Annecy, F. I am learning about the various aspects to be considered when developing novel antibiotics, bringing academia, industry, and regulatory insights together. Thank you very much for Patrice and Catherine Courvalin for organizing such a great course, which is celebrating it’s 10th anniversary this year!

16. September 2026 – Paper published on evolutionary escape of bacterial prey from predation in The ISME Journal

Superbugs are getting tougher, but predatory bacteria like B. bacteriovorus can hunt them down! We show that model bacterium E.coli can escape these ‘living antibiotic’ by evolution, mainly through OmpF-porin loss. However, this comes at a cost ⚡ .
Our newly accepted manuscript provides insights into this intricate bacterial predator-prey interaction. Link here.

Many thanks to my co-corresponding and first author Subham Mridha as well as Rolf Kümmerli for the collaboration on this extensive study at University of Zurich. This work was additionally supported by three great Master students Sarah Loose, Ove Chr. Mattmann and Saskia Isele, as well as Bernd Roschitzki from the Functional Genomics Center Zurich.

This project nucleated based on FAN funding from the UZH Alumni Foundation and Ernst Göhner Stiftung. Completion of the study was enabled by Kurt and Senta Herrmann-Stiftung, as well as the Swiss National Science Foundation.

10. April 2026 – Starting the lab at IFIK

A wholehearted thank you to the European Research Council (ERC) for the ERC Starting Grant BAC-MUNITY. This allowed the start of a new research lab at this institute and bringing together a fabulous team to execute the ERC Starting grant 2025 project. Recently we got a brand new Nikon Ti2-e AxR NSPARC microscope, particularly well suited to image our predatory bacteria. Our ERC Staring grant project including the super-resolution microscope is funded by the European Union.

10. Feburary 2026 – General online article on Innovation News Network

Article which highlights the potential of Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus – a ‘living antibiotic’ – to help tackle rising antimicrobial resistance (AMR).