Antimicrobial resistance of infectious agents is a growing global threat. To prevent the further evolution and spread of drug resistance, rational design of antibiotic treatment across scales is needed. Host immunity is an important, but often overlooked factor in the clearance of resistant infections. In my work, I use mathematical modeling of within-host infection dynamics to study the interplay between host immune responses and antibiotic treatment. My aim is to understand how within-host infection processes are modulated by drugs, and how treatment parameters can be optimized for successful therapies in synergy with host’s natural defenses (Gjini and Brito, 2016, Gjini et al. 2020).

Another direction of my work focuses on multi-drug combination therapies and multi-drug resistance evolution. We develop a simple mathematical framework to show that antibiotic interactions and collateral effects of evolution are inseparable drivers of multidrug resistance interlinked by the classical Price equation from evolutionary theory (Gjini and Wood, 2021).

Related work:

• Freire et al. (2024) Modeling spatial evolution of multi-drug resistance under drug environmental gradients. upcoming in PLOS Computational Biology