Alex Kong is a Researcher at the Access to Medicine Foundation working on the Access to Medicine Index. Alex holds a Doctor of Pharmacy (PharmD) degree from the University of Kansas, USA. As an undergraduate, Alex contributed to the work of a number of laboratories, as a research assistant, including on the intracellular distribution of drugs and their corresponding pharmacokinetic characteristics, and on the characterisation of a novel form of tetracycline resistance found in soil bacteria.
Building on this research, Alex went on to become a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge in the UK and earned a Master of Philosophy degree in Pharmacology. Alex’s Master’s thesis focused on the characterisation of PatAB, a multidrug transporter that confers antibiotic resistance to Streptococcus pneumoniae: the primary pathogen responsible for community-acquired pneumonia.