🔴 Day 2 Live Update
An insightful presentation by Dr. Lucas Boeck on “Antibiotic efficacy beyond resistance.”
Dr. Boeck is a Research Group Leader at the Department of Biomedicine, University of Basel, and is also affiliated with University Hospital Basel. His research focuses on pulmonary infection biology, with particular interest in Mycobacterium abscessus, antibiotic tolerance, bacterial survival and the factors that contribute to treatment failure beyond conventional drug resistance.
A major focus of Dr. Boeck’s research is understanding why bacteria can survive antibiotic exposure even when they do not carry conventional genetic resistance mechanisms. His work examines bacterial tolerance and persistence as additional factors that can influence treatment outcomes.
Recent research led by Dr. Boeck and collaborators introduced Antimicrobial Single-Cell Testing (ASCT), a live-cell imaging approach that measures bacterial killing at single-cell resolution. In studies of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the researchers found that drug-specific killing dynamics in starved bacteria were more predictive of treatment efficacy than conventional measures based only on growth inhibition. The approach was also evaluated across hundreds of M. abscessus strains to investigate strain-specific differences in antibiotic tolerance.
This work highlights why understanding antibiotic efficacy requires looking beyond whether bacteria are simply classified as resistant or susceptible. Examining how individual bacterial cells survive and respond to treatment can provide additional information relevant to drug development and treatment research.
Dr. Boeck’s presentation contributes to the Day 2 scientific discussions at Frontiers in TB & Mycobacteriology 2026, bringing attention to bacterial survival, antibiotic tolerance and the relationship between antimicrobial activity and treatment outcomes.
This conference is organized by Impact Research Communications (IRC)
More info: https://tb.ircconferences.net/ | Frontiers in TB & Mycobacteriology
