Daire Cantillon is a Lecturer in Infection Biology & Therapeutics, based in the department of Tropical Disease Biology. He has worked across both industry and academic settings, with various projects under his current research portfolio linked to industry. Prior to joining LSTM, he obtained a BSc Biochemistry from University College Cork, followed by a MSc Toxicology from University of Surrey. His MSc was funded by a GlaxoSmithKline scholarship which enabled him to work in pharmaceutical drug development. He was awarded his PhD from Brighton and Sussex Medical School in 2018 for developing a novel biofilm model of mycobacteria to understand antibiotic tolerance in TB. This was followed by a postdoc at Brighton and Sussex Medical School on mycobacterial drug discovery, and a second AMR postdoc position brought him to LSTM in 2020.

He is an elected member of the Microbiology Society Prokaryote Division, sits on the steering group of the LSTM Centre for Tuberculosis Research and is the Academic in Residence for the LSTM-National Measurement Laboratory PRISM Hub.

His lab researches chronic AMR infections to understand pathogen host interactions, characterise novel mechanisms of AMR and develop a range of therapeutics. This work primarily focuses on mycobacteria such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative agent of TB, and non-tuberculous mycobacteria such as Mycobacterium abscessus, a globally emerging multidrug resistant opportunistic pathogen. He also studies uropathogenic Escherichia coli to develop new vaccine modalities and optimise antibiotic treatment for UTIs. More recently, he has expanded into pathogenic fungi, defining environmental reservoirs of disease in social housing and progressing antifungal monoclonal therapies towards clinical application.

Current projects include:

• BRITE: Biologics Regional Innovation Technology Ecosystem- developing the Northwest as a global manufacturing destination for biologics
• Developing cysteamine as a host directed therapy and antibiotic potentiator in TB, working with NovaBiotics
• AFB-seq: a reliable and reproducible whole genome sequencing workflow for Acid Fast Bacilli
• Mapping fungal epidemiology of social housing
• Optimising an intracellular model of CL3 Gram negative bacterial infection to optimise antibiotic therapies
• Characterising AMR evolution and pathogen host interactions of Uropathogenic E. coli with bladder organoids
• Evaluating NGS diagnostics for MDR TB and NTM in DRC and Kenya
• Advancing FcHexaForge to market: a multimerisation Fc-engineering technology for potentiating therapeutic monoclonals

Daire is module co-lead of TROP737 One Health Microbiology on the MSc One Health in Tropical Disease and teaches on TROP707 for both MSc Tropical Disease Biology and MRes Tropical Health & Infectious Disease Research. He supervises MSc, MRes and PhD students as well as hosting students in his lab who are on more non-traditional pathways such as apprenticeships. He also trains and upskills researchers to work at BSL3.