Professor Ugochukwu Anieto of Texas A&M University reveals how AMI’s Scientific Event Travel Grant helped him to gather some fascinating insights on drug discovery at the recent ASM 2024 conference. 

I attended the annual American Society for Microbiology 2024 conference in Atlanta Georgia United States from the 13th – 17th of June. The conference started with an opening lecture in which the invited speaker focused on her work on colorectal cancer and the bacteria that are involved in producing molecules that eventually alter the DNA, leading to cancer.

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Subsequent days of the conference were for different sessions, and I focused mainly on topics that dealt with antimicrobial compounds. Among the lectures I attended were Discovery of Novel Drugs in Antimicrobial Resistance and Susceptibility Testing, Application of New Antimicrobial Agents in Real-Life Clinical Cases, the Teaching of Microbiology – I found this very rewarding as it threw more light on drug development and discovery.

I also attended the Pre-Clinical Drug Development PK/PD Studies Using Human Simulated Dosing Versus Dose-ranging Approaches, 40th Annual Minority Mixer, Refining Clinical Breakpoints via Integrated PK/PD Approaches, Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing, the African Initiative Group, a talk by Dr. Iruka Okeke and her research work in Nigeria etc. During the poster presentation, I interacted with a medical student from the laboratory of Dr. Greenberg from University of Texas Southwestern (UTSW). She was presenting a very interesting research paper that showed that the application of magnetic field and certain antibiotics reduce infection in joint wounds significantly. A very interesting talk!

Networking opportunities

My participation was of great benefit to me in so many ways. It enabled me to meet very reputable scientists in my field, who are breaking new grounds and discovering new antibiotics. I also used this opportunity to network with so many scientists, many of which I was able to establish a working agreement with.

I used the opportunity of attending this conference to learn how to improve my own research efforts, especially with respect to antimicrobial compounds discovery. On June 15, I was privileged to present my poster on my novel antibiotic, Anietocin, and had the privilege to interact with other presenters and visitors to my poster.

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I benefitted a lot from this conference because it enabled me to participate in different interesting sessions, meet new people and learned on how best to move my research work forward through interactions with other scientists.

Ugochukwu Aniet is Instructional Associate Professor of Biology at Texas A&M University.

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