Dr Felix Sizwe Dube
Affiliations
- Associate Member, Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine
- Senior Lecturer, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, Faculty of Science
- Computational Biology Group
Key Expertise
Anti-microbial Resistance, Bioinformatics, Biomarker Discovery, Bacterial Infections, Co-Infection, Diagnosis, Drug Resistance, Genomic Surveillance, HIV, Microbiome, Molecular Medicine, Omics, Pathogenesis, Skin Infections, Vaccine Design, Vaccine Development
Main Research Focus
Felix Dube is a medical microbiologist with broader research interests in the microbial dysbiosis associated with infectious diseases. The current focus is on Streptococcus pneumoniae (the ‘pneumococcus’), a bacterium that is a major bacterial cause of diseases including pneumonia and meningitis worldwide. By applying high-throughput genome sequencing techniques, this work provides further insights into the pneumococcal pathobiome, especially changes in pneumococcal sero-epidemiology, pathogenesis through statistical and computational approaches to unravel genotype[1]phenotype associations. This work is interfaced with an in-depth characterization of the nasopharyngeal resistome in children colonized by pneumococci. A recent but rapidly expanding component of our research group is around the evolution of the microbiome at different body sites in African children and the relationship between the microbiome and child health, with a specific focus on respiratory and skin infections and on antimicrobial resistance.
Most Significant Paper Authored in 2024
Sputum bacterial load and bacterial composition correlate with lung function and are altered
by long-term azithromycin treatment in children with HIV-associated chronic lung disease.
Abotsi RE, Dube FS, Rehman AM, Claassen-Weitz S, Xia Y, Simms V, Mwaikono KS, Gardner-Lubbe S, McHugh G, Ngwira LG, Kwambana-Adams B, Heyderman RS, Odland JØ, Ferrand RA, Nicol MP; BREATHE study team.
This study showed that azithromycin (AZM) treatment preserved sputum bacterial diversity and reduced the relative abundances of the HIV-associated chronic lung disease (HCLD) specifically the general Haemophilus and Moraxella. These bacteriological effects were associated with improvement in lung function and may account for reduced respiratory exacerbations associated with AZM treatment of children with HCLD.