Research

The Johnston Laboratory is an interdisciplinary and highly collaborative team of microbiologists, synthetic biologists, bioinformaticians and engineers. The long-term goal of our research is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the capabilities of microbes/microbial communities within tumors, elucidate the underlying mechanisms driving their behavior and utilize this knowledge to engineer innovative therapeutics and advanced microbe-based technologies for cancer prevention and treatment.

To achieve this, we use cutting-edge bacterial omics techniques (including culturomics, pangenomics, pan-epigenomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics) to generate hypotheses centered on understanding how specific microbes migrate to, colonize and persist within human tumors. We then utilize synthetic microbiology principles to develop genetic systems for these tumor-associated microbes, allowing us to experimentally test and refine our hypotheses using in vitro and pre-clinical models of disease.

Moreover, using knowledge gained, we aim to harness the innate abilities of microbes to access recalcitrant areas of the tumor microenvironment and engineer them as effective delivery vehicles for therapeutic payloads (bugs as drugs).