Dr Sara Boyd, Academic Clinical Fellow in Infectious Diseases and Microbiology starts her MRC Fellowship in August this year.

Dr Sara Boyd, Academic Clinical Fellow in Infectious Diseases and Microbiology at the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Healthcare Associated Infection and AMR has been awarded an MRC Clinical Research Training Fellowship in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, which starts in August this year.

An extremely limited number of new and effective antibiotics for pneumonia have been developed over the past thirty years. This is because several drugs that appeared promising in the laboratory did not work as well as expected in patients. Of greatest concern is the fact that bacteria are quickly becoming resistant to the antibiotics we currently rely on. Healthcare associated bacterial pneumonia (HAP) is an unmet medical need for which we urgently need new therapies.

Dr Boyd’s PhD Fellowship entitled “Developing new drugs for pneumonia in the era of antimicrobial resistance” will build tools to accelerate the successful development of new drugs for pneumonia that are safe, effective and reduce the emergence of resistance. Adequate drug exposure is critical to optimise clinical outcomes and to decrease the risk of resistance. However, several drugs have failed to obtain licensure for pneumonia due to limited understanding of dose-exposure-response relationships. This research will use state-of-the-art techniques to identify the antibiotic dosages and regimens for patients with pneumonia that will achieve optimal drug exposure at the site of infection.

Dr Boyd will generate new spatially resolved knowledge of antibiotic concentration-time profiles in pathological subcompartments of infected lung. She will relate these to microbiological outcomes, including bacterial kill and the suppression of resistance, using a combination of mechanistic physiology-based pharmacokinetic modelling and experimentally driven pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic (PK-PD) modelling. This research will facilitate more informed ‘go/no-go’ decisions when pharmaceutical companies are considering the compounds, dosages and regimens that are most likely to be successful in clinical trials for patients with HAP. New antibiotics are urgently needed to help address the high mortality associated with drug-resistant infections. Dr Boyd’s research aims to build tools to accelerate the successful development of new antibiotics so that patients around the world may benefit. 

There is a need to grow clinical academic capacity in antimicrobial pharmacology as the drive for new drugs and innovative treatment strategies to meet the challenge of AMR intensifies. Dr Boyd hopes to help to address this need by developing a unique skillset including in-vitro, in-vivo and in-silico clinical PK-PD methodologies. Dr Boyd’s 3 year PhD Fellowship will build on a strong collaboration between the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Healthcare Associated Infection and AMR at Imperial College London, The Centre for Antimicrobial Pharmacodynamics (CAP) at the University of Liverpool, and an exciting industry partnership with Roche in Basel. Dr Boyd’s research will be supervised by Professor William Hope (Liverpool), Professor Alison Holmes (Imperial) and Dr Richard Peck (Global Head of Clinical Pharmacology at Roche).