LSU Veterinary Professor Yogesh Saini will begin research this month to help fight the growing problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Dr. Saini’s research is funded by the Louisiana Board of Regents, which gives out research grants every year. Last year, Dr. Saini was one of 151 applicants for a Research Competitiveness grant. He recently learned that he was among the 14 proposals to receive the grant, receiving $147,000 to fund his research.
Antibiotics are drugs that fight bacterial infections and have greatly improved modern medicine. The number of fatal infections has dropped dramatically since the invention of penicillin in 1928.
It is not uncommon for doctors to over prescribe antibiotics to patients, according to the World Health Organization. Many people take over-the-counter antibiotics for viruses such as the flu. The animal industry routinely misuses antibiotics as well, by using antibiotics to regularly to promote growth.
Antibiotic misuse has led to antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. These strains cannot be cured with modern antibiotics. Antibiotic-resistant strains of infections like pneumonia are already reaching “high levels” around the world, according to the WHO.
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria can threaten decades of progress made in modern medicine without new forms of treatment.
Saini is researching a method to help fight antibiotic-resistant bacteria in patients’ lungs. He hopes to develop a pharmaceutical that will enhance the host’s immune system clear bacteria in the lungs instead of developing more powerful antibiotics to fight infection. Dr. Saini called this pharmaceutical preparation a “magic bullet” designed to “enhance macrophage function” in the lungs. Macrophages are large white blood cells responsible to fighting away bacterial infections.
“[The enhanced macrophages] will be expected to target all the bacterial species including antibiotic-resistant strains,” Dr. Saini said.
The research will take three years and involve extensive experimentation on genetically-altered mice. The mice will all have cystic fibrosis — a genetic disorder that makes the host particularly susceptible to bacterial infection in the lungs. The mice will also have genetically-altered macrophages, and the researchers will observe how their defense systems respond to bacterial infection in the lungs. Then, they will use the mice to discover how to strengthen a host’s macrophages so that antibiotics would not be needed to fight infection.
“We have made significant progress in developing tools for the mice-based studies,” Saini said.
They anticipate moving on to testing pharmaceutical preparations that can strengthen macrophages soon. These preparations will be then be tested on various animals before making it to humans.
“If everything goes well, we anticipate the development of therapeutics in foreseeable future,” Dr. Saini said.
The $147,000 grant is expected to cover all the costs of his research including hiring student workers to assist him in his laboratory.
Saini knows the potential benefits of his research, and is confident that his proposal would be among the few chosen to receive the research grant.
“The availability of all the transgenic mice, convincing preliminary data and our expertise in this area of research was expected to return favorable outcome.” Saini said, “Obviously, it was nice to see that the proposal did exceptionally well.”