Jennie Kwon
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Medicine & Clinical Research
Bacteria that resist antibiotics, called antimicrobial resistant organisms (AROs), were once mainly a hospital problem. Now they are spreading in the community.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
antimicrobial resistance
antimicrobial resistant organisms
community-associated infections
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through May 2031
What they work on
- Identify clinical risk factors for community-associated antibiotic-resistant infections, using a database of patients with urinary tract and bloodstream infections from community and healthcare settings.
- Measure how many patients admitted from the community already carry antimicrobial resistant organisms and what predicts carriage, using selective microbiologic culture of clinical specimens.
- Find reservoirs and risk factors for resistant bacteria in healthy community volunteers by sampling both the people and their home environments in a prospective cohort study.
- Identify ESBL-producing E. coli genes linked to adaptation to urine, resistance trade-offs and recurrent UTI risk, using genomic analysis of clinical isolates and paired stool and urine from four states.
- Characterize gut and urinary microbiome, metabolite and host signatures of UTI susceptibility, and validate key bacterial genes using human organoids and a mouse model.
More about the research
Nearly half of infections from extended-spectrum beta-lactamase producing Enterobacterales (ESBL-E), gut bacteria that break down many common antibiotics, now start outside hospitals. Many people carry these bacteria harmlessly in the gut or urinary tract, a state called colonization. Some carriers later develop infections such as urinary tract infections (UTIs). The lab's projects ask who carries these bacteria, where they come from, and what turns harmless carriage into infection.
Why it matters
Antibiotic-resistant E. coli alone caused an estimated 9,100 deaths and $1.2 billion in costs in 2017, and resistant infections increasingly arise in otherwise healthy people outside hospitals. This work could guide infection prevention for at-risk people, home hygiene recommendations and first-line antibiotic choices in the community, and may identify biomarkers for future diagnostics and preventive approaches for recurrent urinary tract infections.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Eva Raphael
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Identify demographic and neighborhood-level risk factors for community-onset UTIs caused by ESBL-producing E. coli in women, using causal inference methods, compared with other resistant and with antibiotic-susceptible UTIs.
Sapna K Deo
University of Miami, FL·Biochemistry
Develop a bioluminescence-based test using light-emitting Photobacterium cells to quantify urinary tract infection-causing bacteria in urine, read on both a microtiter plate reader and a handheld luminometer.
Jonathan Chen
Stanford University, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Harmonize and share electronic health record data on suspected urinary tract infections across Stanford, UT Southwestern and Harvard to support multi-site model building.
The school
Washington University in St Louis: 97 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 365 research doctorates a year.
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