August 21, 2010
Zach Tackett, a second-year doctor of pharmacy student at the School, has received a $2,000 grant from the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute to study a potential new drug target to help treat MRSA staph infections, which kill more people in the United States each year than AIDS.
The award will fund a study of MdeA, an efflux pump in the cell membrane of Staphylococcus aureus, the bacterium that is the most common cause of staph infections. Efflux pumps are transporter proteins that pump toxic substances and antibiotics out of the cell. That function makes them key players in bacterial resistance to antibiotics.
Some efflux pumps target specific drugs. Tackett recently found that MW2337, an efflux protein which his preliminary data suggest likely mutated from MdeA, confers resistance to the antibiotic ciprofloxacin. Ciprofloxacin is a fluoroquinolone antibiotic and is an alternative treatment for MRSA, which have developed resistance to other commonly used antibiotics. Concerns about resistance, however, have greatly limited the use of fluoroquinolones, Tackett says. For instance, ciprofloxacin is now rarely used in hospitals to treat MRSA because of the large number of resistant strains.
Tackett will study MdeA and MW2337 in E. coli and determine their effects on the potency of several antibiotics. He says the study is a first step in determining whether MW2337 or MdeA could be targets for new inhibitors that may increase the potency of existing antibiotics against MRSA.
“An inhibitor of MdeA or MW2337 may decrease the antibiotic dose needed to treat S. aureus infections,” says Tackett, who is conducting his research in associate professor Scott Singleton’s lab as part of an honors project. “The results of this study will help provide the tools and knowledge base to develop such inhibitors.”
The grant, titled “Characterization of a Novel Fluoroquinolone Resistance Gene in Staphylococcus aureus,” was one of two chosen for funding out of eight applications. TraC$2K grants assist researchers in implementing a proposed study or move a research project forward by providing rapid access to funds that will support almost any aspect of promising and innovative research.
The NC TraCS Institute at UNC-Chapel Hill is one of fifty-five medical research institutions working together as a national consortium to improve the way biomedical research is conducted across the country. The consortium, funded through the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA), works to reduce the time it takes for laboratory discoveries to become treatments for patients, to engage communities in clinical research efforts, and to train a new generation of clinical researchers. The CTSA program is led by the National Center for Research Resources, part of the National Institutes of Health.
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