I know that this mostly an institute focussed on cancer research but I actually don’t do cancer research; I’m a bacteriologist and I work on E coli and salmonella. We’re just now beginning to appreciate the role of our microbiome and how it helps us respond and handle many pathological states, including cancer. We have a great example where a recent discovery of a bacteria called helicobacter pylori is known to cause ulcers in humans, it has also played some role in gastric cancer, in particular in Asian populations. So there’s some relationship between pathogenesis of bacteria and also other pathological states but we don’t quite understand that process.

Do you work on specific proteins?

I work on both membrane proteins but also cytoplasmic proteins, DNA binding proteins. So bacteria are amazing in that they can sense environmental changes and then change the genes that they express. So when we ingest infected food salmonella can sense that it’s no longer on the potato salad but in your gut, changes the genes it’s expressing and turns on a whole virulence programme. So I’m interested in how that happens.

Are there practical applications?

Obviously controlling infectious disease is a huge component in terms of both tuberculosis, HIV, there are new outbreaks of smallpox, measles as people are fearing being vaccinated. So now we have resurgence, re-emergence and we always have new infectious diseases appearing as we change our farming practices, change the food that we eat, provide new niches for microbial evolution and pathogenesis.

What are the clinical applications?

I think infectious disease is a problem all over the world but in particular in Singapore we have special Dengue virus which is a viral infection, but we also have Salmonella typhi endemic in that part of the world, so that’s somewhat related to the salmonella that I study.

What’s the link between your research and mechanobiology?

That’s an interesting question and I think now we have new sets of tools and new ways of approaching basic biological problems so we can begin to understand how do mechanical cues affect outcomes. So say, for example, when salmonella is in a macrophage vacuole it actually senses that acid environment and changes the genes that it expresses. Now we can begin to ask how are mechanical cues when the bacteria change volume, for example, how is that related to the programme of gene expression changes that occur?

What does the future hold?

The future, well we’re in the best of times and the worst of times. We have a global economic crisis which has had a serious impact on funding for biomedical research and yet at the other extreme we have a lot of innovation, new technologies, new ways of asking questions that relate to biomedical research. So our challenge is finding places in the world, and Singapore is one of them, that are funding biomedical research and using these new technologies in different ways to explore pathogenesis, cancer etc.