Respiratory & Infectious Diseases

Director: Laurent RENIA
Co-Director: David LYE

The Respiratory and Infectious Disease Programme is a top priority of LKCMedicine. The program focuses on three major axes: bacterial infectious diseases, respiratory diseases, and vector-borne and emerging infectious diseases. It integrates disciplines across microbiology, clinical infectious diseases, and basic biology to exploit technological advances in systems biology and genomics, to gain novel insights into pathogen biology and disease pathogenesis. Our goal is to address urgent global problems in drug resistance, emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases and biosecurity, antimicrobial resistance (clinical and environmental, including tropical neglected diseases), redefining bacterial factors driving disease progression in the context of the microbiome, and developing diagnostic and therapeutic tools to combat infectious diseases.

Another area of importance is infectious respiratory disease including environmental influence on pulmonary infection in chronic respiratory disease states, the pulmonary microbiome, and specifically how the fungi Aspergillus fumigatus and the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa affect major Asian respiratory disease states such as bronchiectasis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and severe asthma.

We have also set up The Academic Respiratory Initiative for Pulmonary Health (TARIPH) as a national research platform that addresses respiratory health and disease in Singapore which aims to bring together interdisciplinary teams that share common interests for the exchange of ideas and development of sustainable relationships thus providing an organisational framework for academic respiratory research.

Our team comprises a tightly knit group of researchers who have cultivated common research interests and working partnerships in identified niche specialities. We have interdisciplinary expertise with a large technological hinterland (basic microbiology, molecular and structural biology, virology, malaria. antibiotic development, pulmonary microbiome, bacteriophage therapy, low cost point-of-care diagnostic tools, microfabrication engineering) that allows us to delve deeper and further into the ever-changing world of infectious disease