John Osei Sekyere is a Ghanaian pharmacist (B. Pharm) and clinical/medical microbiologist (PhD) with especial interest and skill in antimicrobial resistance, infectious diseases epidemiology and diagnostics, host-microbiome interactions and bacterial genomics. He is currently with the Department of Medical Microbiology, University of Pretoria, where he supervises postgraduate students and researches on microbiomics (gut-lung axis), genomic epidemiology of bacteria, and One Health antimicrobial resistance using next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics. His current projects include hunting for adjuvants that can modulate or synergise the efficacy of approved antibiotics to combat multidrug-resistant bacteria, probiotics and vaccine research, microbiome-immunity-drug interactions in the host etc. 

Project: Investigation into Mycobacterium tuberculosis and other bacterial pathogens in the context of host-pathogen interactions, host-microbiome and pathogen-microbiome interactions, and genome editing techniques

Sekyere has been awarded an AIMF grant to travel to the Central Drug Research Institute and the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute in India to undertake training in microbiomics, immunology, animal models of tuberculosis, and CRISPR interference to silence or modify the genome of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. He will be visiting Amit Misra of the Central Drug Research Institute at Lucknow, India, and Nisheeth Agrawal of the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute based in Delhi, India. This collaborative visit is being funded by the AAS-AIMF award for a period of 42 days to establish research collaborations between these two institutions and the Department of Medical Microbiology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. These collaborations shall lead to the exchange of ideas and research technology/skill to advance investigations into Mycobacterium tuberculosis and other bacterial pathogens in the context of host-pathogen interactions, host-microbiome and pathogen-microbiome interactions, and genome editing techniques.