Julian Bobis Camacho
About Julian Bobis Camacho
I am third-year PhD student at the Department of Infectious Diseases at the University of Gothenburg, under the supervision of Prof. Carl-Fredrik Flach. I have a background both in biomedicine and in molecular microbiology. The aim of my PhD project here at Sahlgrenska is to develop and test a sewage-based surveillance system to monitor antibiotic resistance in human pathogens like E. coli or Klebsiella spp.
Antibiotic resistance is a major public-health threat the consequences of which we are already seeing and suffering. Nowadays, some bacteria have even developed resistance to last-line antibiotics used in the clinic against the most virulent infections. If no actions are taken, we risk running out of treatment options and going back to a pre-antibiotic era. The few newly designed antimicrobial drugs will not solve this crisis. Therefore, we need new innovative solutions to control the spread of antibiotic resistance and improve knowledge on their dissemination.
Developing a monitoring system based on sewage wastewater sampling would allow the analysis of antibiotic resistance profiles from thousands of individuals in a fast and easy way, other than having to take individual samples from the high number of people by classic culture-based approaches, which are costly, lengthy and require considerable infrastructure. This system would very valuable in low-income countries, as in many cases they lack the infrastructure for clinical surveillance. The information generated would guide empirical antibiotic therapy in the clinic and could serve as an early-warning system, as it does not rely on the sampling and culturing of individual samples from the clinic.
ORCID ID: Bobis Camacho, J. 0009-0002-5030-2018