Collaborations

Genetically Encodeable Reporters of Bacterial Status in Tuberculosis
Joanne Flynn, Professor of Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
David Russell, Microbiology and Immunology, Cornell University.
Funding: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Accelerator Grant Program.

Tuberculosis (TB) has been a significant disease problem throughout human history and still plagues humanity. Although effective chemotherapy is available for most patients, the long duration of daily treatment required to cure is difficult to administer among the disadvantaged and in the developing world. The need to understand the prolonged killing kinetics of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) during treatment is one of the priorities of the Gates Foundation’s focus on TB. This new collaboration is a piece of a much larger program project that addresses this issue directly through the use of a monkey (cynomolgus macaques) model of TB to give precise information about the presence, location and status of Mtb in vivo. The project is large collaborative effort involving the University of Pittsburgh , NIH, Cornell, Vanderbilt University, Oxford University and Scripps. DRBIO’s role in this project is to employ sensitive fluorescence-based methods to assess the in vivo physiological status of Mtb and correlate that status with the environment during the course of infection. Details of DRBIO's role in this project can be found under the Core R&D project III, Aim 1 description.