February 27, 2014
Researchers at the UNC School of Medicine and the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy have received a grant from the National Institutes of Health for research aimed at developing novel tuberculosis drugs.
The grant will provide more than $417,000 over two years to support a collaboration between principal investigators Miriam Braunstein, PhD, and William Janzen. Braunstein is a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the UNC School of Medicine. Janzen is the director of assay development and compound profiling at the Center for Integrative Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy.
Tuberculosis infects one-third of the world’s population. In 2011, almost 9 million people around the world became sick with TB, and there were 1.4 million TB-related deaths. Drug-resistant strains ofM. tuberculosis are on the rise, and cases of totally drug-resistant forms of the disease have been found in recent years.
“Tuberculosis is one of the most frightening health problems facing the world today, and there is a desperate need to develop novel drugs to treat this disease,” Braunstein says.
Braunstein and Janzen’s labs are trying to target the protein-export system of M. tuberculosis for novel drug development. Protein export is the process by which proteins are transported from the cytoplasm to outside the cell. Many proteins exported by M. tuberculosis play key roles in causing TB.
The grant will support a project to test the feasibility of targeting the SecA1 protein. Braunstein says SecA1 is predicted to be an essential component of the Sec pathway, which carries out the majority of protein export that occurs in bacteria.
“We have been very successful in another project that targets protein export, so we are enthusiastic about this program’s probability of success,” says Janzen, whose group will work on the development of a high throughput screen.
Braunstein says the research might also help the development of drugs for other bacterial diseases.
“The Sec pathway is highly conserved among bacteria, so the results of our research may also aid future drug design directed at SecA targets of other drug-resistant bacterial pathogens,” she says.
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