About Ana Carolina
Undergraduate student majoring in Biomedical Sciences with a concentration in Microbiology and Infectious Disease and minoring in Chemistry and Science Communications. She joined the MARC (Maximizing Access to Research Careers) program in 2023, an NIH funded research program, which paired her with the Robertson lab, where she works with Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb). Human tuberculosis is a treatable disease, but treatment is lengthy with one of the main obstacles being a failure of current therapies to reach therapeutic levels (pharmacokinetics) and/or be effective against populations of Mtb bacteria present in patients (pharmacodynamics). Ana’s project seeks to overcome this problem by developing new technology based on peptides that specifically recognize and home to Mtb-infected tissue and/or the Mtb bacilli, penetrate the tissue barriers protecting the bacilli, and that can carry a drug payload directly to the site of infection.