Freya Harrison

My team researches how bacterial pathogens are able to form long-lived, chronic infections with high levels of tolerance to antibiotics. To do this, we study how bacteria grow and behave, and respond to drugs, in environments that closely mimic the unique environments they find inside an infected person. We are especially interested in infections in the lungs of people with the genetic disorder cystic fibrosis, infections of non-healing wounds, and infections that stem from microbial contamination of hospital ventilator tubes. We are using our microbiology knowledge, and a set of new tools that we have built in the lab, to try to find the Achilles' heel of debilitating and often lethal biofilm infections. We hope our tools will help researchers work on many different aspects of lung infection microbiology without the need for experiments on live animals. We also work with colleagues from different disciplines to discover new molecules that could treat antibiotic-resistant infections. With colleagues from the arts and humanities, we are researching infection remedies from medieval and early modern medical books to see if any of them contain molecules with real potential to treat infection. With colleagues from chemistry, we are testing synthetic molecules for their ability to kill bacteria.

Harrington, Niamh E., Allen, Freya, Garcia Maset, Ramón and Harrison, Freya (2026) <a href="https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/199429/"><em>Pseudomonas aeruginosa gene expression changes during established biofilm infection in a cystic fibrosis lung model.</em></a> Microbiology, 172 (3). 001678. doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1099/mic.0.001678" target="_blank">10.1099/mic.0.001678</a> ISSN 1350-0872. Harrison, Freya and Orababa, Oluwatosin Q. (2026) <a href="https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/197324/"><em>Microbial primer : ancientbiotics – making modern antimicrobials from historical infection remedies : this article is part of the microbial primers collection.</em></a> Microbiology, 172 (1). 001642. doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1099/mic.0.001642" target="_blank">10.1099/mic.0.001