Tiny Worlds, Big Impact: Microbes, Microplastics, and the Future of Medicine

Chinmay Dwibedi is a group leader at the Swedish node of Nordic-EMBL partnership for Molecular Medicine [MIMS], within the department of Clinical Microbiology, faculty of Medicine at Umeå University. He is also a Data-driven Life Sciences [DDLS] fellow in Epidemiology and Biology of Infection. His research is focused on studying the human gut microbiota in the context of health and disease.

Your gut bacteria may influence how well diabetes medicines work. This talk explores how combining gut microbiota with our body’s biology could help tailor treatments to each individual.

Nikola Zlatkov is a microbiologist who is interested in bacterial eco-evolutionary dynamics, emphasizing novel types of mutagenesis induced by genetic isolation and/or novel environmental stressors, such as nanoplastics. Such studies may reveal unprecedented, anthropogenically induced biological phenomena, such as delayed mutagenesis or plastic-borne pathogens.

“The Ecological Tower of Babel” portrays the invisible danger of nanoplastics – infinitesimally small pieces of plastic resulting from the breakdown of plastic product material. I discuss how nanoplastics may induce mutations and why this kind of mutagenesis is markedly different from what we have seen so far from known mutagens.

Mohamed Ali is an Assistant Professor of Biochemistry and a biomedical researcher specializing in molecular biology, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine. His work focuses on cell culture, immunohistochemistry, qPCR, oxidative stress, nucleic acid analysis, and assay development, with a strong interest in cancer biology and biomarker-based research.

This talk introduces organ-on-chip technology and its role in transforming drug discovery. It explains how microfluidic systems replicate human organ function to model disease, test drug responses, and improve preclinical accuracy, reducing reliance on animal models and accelerating translational biomedical research.